England, a nation : being the papers of the Patriots' Club

ENGLAND: A NATION

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ENGLAND: A NATION

BEING THE PAPERS OF
THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

EDITED BY

LUCIAN OLDERSHAW

LONDON AND EDINBURGH

R. BRIMLEY JOHNSON

1904

^ V

o

CONTENTS

THE PATRIOTIC IDEA - . , . 1

By G. K. Chesterton.

THE ENGLISH CITY - - - - 44

By C. F. G. Mastennan.

THE ENGLISH COUNTRYSIDE - - - 95

By R. C. K. Ensor.

THE CASE OF IRELAND- - - - 130

By Hugh Law, M.P.

THE CASE OF MACEDONIA - - - 159

By Henry W. Nevinson.

THE CASE OF SOUTH AFRICA - - - 183

By J. L. Hammond.

PATRIOTISM AND EDUCATION - - - 200

By Reginald A. Bray, L.C.C.

PATRIOTISM AND THE CHRISTIAN FAITH - 234

By the Eev. Conrad NoeL

THE FACT OF THE MATTER - - - 253

By the Editor.

300783

Old England^ gracious wielder of the spell
Of pastoral heauty, janitress benign
Of green Arcadian temples, matron-belle
Robed rich of rustic glory, it is well,
Yea, past all boasting, to be son of thine.

Foul fall such ingrates as the spell proclaim
A charm outworn, and in tJieir lust of gold
Deem thy swift conquests of sublimer fame
Than this that sliaped them — English such in name.
Yet aliens utter both in heart and mould.

Stay thou green England, fill thy loins with store

Of peasant manhood, sow thou plenteous seed

Of such grim valour as was thine of yore,

Be thy strong philtres aye and everrrwre

The brood green woodland and the wind-swept mead !

GEORGE BARTRAM.

THE PATRIOTIC IDEA

By G. K. Chesterton

THE scepticism of the last two centuries
has attacked patriotism as it has
attacked all the other theoretic passions of
mankind, and in the case of patriotism the
attack has been interesting and respectable
because it has come from a set of modern
writers who are not mere sceptics, but who
really have an organic belief in philosophy
and politics. Tolstoy, perhaps the greatest
of living Europeans, has succeeded in
founding a school which, whatever its faults
(and they are neither few nor small), has all
the characteristics of a great religion. Like
a great religion, it is positive, it is public,
above all, it is paradoxical. The Tolstoyan
enjoys asserting the hardest parts of his
belief with that dark and magnificent joy
which has been unknown in the world for
nearly four hundred years. He enjoys
saying, * No man should strike a blow even
to defend his country,' in the same way that
Tertullian enjoyed saying, ' Credo quia im-
possihile.''

1 1

'i2f PAPERS 01^ THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

This important and growing sect, together
with many modern intellectuals of various
schools, directly impugn the idea of pat-
riotism as interfering with the larger senti-
ment of the love of humanity. To them
the particular is always the enemy of the
general. To them every nation is the rival
of mankind. To them, in not a few in-
stances, every man is the rival of mankind.
And they bear a dim and not wholly
agreeable resemblance to a certain kind of
people who go about saying that nobody
should go to church, since God is omni-
present, and not to be found in churches.

Suppose that two men, lost upon some
gray waste in rain and darkness, were to
come upon the light of a porch and take
shelter in some strange house, where the
household entertained them pleasantly. It
might be that some feast or entertainment
was going forward ; that private theatricals
w^ere in preparation, or progressive whist in
progress. One of these travellers might
lend a hand instinctively and heartily, might
play his cards at whist in a fighting spirit,
might black his face in theatricals and make
the children laugh. And this he would do
because he felt kindly towards the whole
company. But the other man would say :
* I love this company so much that I dislike
its being divided into factions by progressive

THE PATRIOTIC IDEA 3

whist ; I love so much the human face
divine that I do not wish to see it obscured
with soot or grease-paint ; I will not take a
partner for the lancers, for that would
involve selecting one woman for special
privilege, and I love you all alike.' The
first man would undoubtedly amuse the
whole company more. And would he not
love the whole company more ?

Every one of us has, indeed, been lost in
a gray waste of eternity, and strayed to the
portal of this earth, over which the lamp is
the sun. We find inside the company of
humanity engaged in certain ancient festivals
and forms, certain competitions and distinc-
tions. And, as in the other case, two kinds
of love can be offered to that society. The
prig will profess to join in their unity ; the
good comrade will join in their divisions.

If the stray guests see something utterly
immoral in the distinctions, something
utterly wicked in the ritual, doubtless they
must protest ; but they should never pro-
test because the distinctions are distinctions,
and therefore in one sense exclusive, or
because the ritual is ritual, and therefore in
one sense irrational. If the stranger in the
house has a moral objection, for instance, to
playing for money, he ought to decline,
though he ought not to enjoy declining.
But he must not ask, * Why am I arbitrarily

1—2

4 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

made a partner with So-and-so ?' He must
not say, ' What rational 'diflPerence is there
between spades and diamonds ?' If he
really loves his kind, he will, as far as he
can, and in the great mass of things, play
the parts given him. He will preserve this
gay and impetuous conservatism; he will
throw himself into the competitive sports
of nationality ; he will walk with relish in
the ancient theatricals of religion.

Because the modern intellectuals who
disapprove of patriotism do not do this, a
strange coldness and unreality hangs about
their love for men. If you ask them
whether they love humanity, they will say,
doubtless sincerely, that they do. But if
you ask them touching any of the classes
that go to make up humanity, you will find
that they hate them all. They hate kings,
they hate priests, they hate soldiers, they
hate sailors. They distrust men of science,
they denounce the middle classes, they
despair of working men, but they adore
humanity. Only they always speak of
humanity as if it were a curious foreign
nation. They are dividing themselves more
and more from men to exalt the strange
race of mankind. They are ceasing to be
human in the effort to be humane.

The truth is, of course, that real univer-
sality is to be reached rather by convincing

THE PATRIOTIC IDEA 5

ourselves that we are in the best possible
relation with our immediate surroundings.
The man who loves his own children is
much more universal, is much more fully in
the general order, than the man who dandles
the infant hippopotamus or puts the young
crocodile in a perambulator. For in loving
his own children he is doing something which
is (if I may use the phrase) far more essen-
tially hippopotamic than dandling hippo-
potami ; he is doing as they do. It is the same
with patriotism. A man who loves humanity
and ignores patriotism is ignoring humanity.
The man who loves his country may not
happen to pay extravagant verbal compli-
ments to humanity, but he is paying to it
the greatest of compliments — imitation.

The fundamental spiritual advantage of
patriotism and such sentiments is this : that
by means of it all things are loved ade-
quately, because all things are loved indi-
vidually. Cosmopolitanism gives us one
country, and it is good; nationalism gives
us a hundred countries, and every one of
them is the best. Cosmopolitanism offers a
positive, patriotism a chorus of superlatives.
Patriotism begins the praise of the world
at the nearest thing, instead of beginning it
at the most distant, and thus it insures
what is, perhaps, the most essential of all
earthly considerations, that nothing upon

6 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

earth shall go without its due appreciation.
Wherever there is a strangely - shaped
mountain upon some lonely island, wherever
there is a nameless kind of fruit growing in
some obscure forest, patriotism insures that
this shall not go into darkness without
being remembered in a song.

There is, moreover, another broad dis-
tinction, which inclines us to side with
those who support the abstract idea of
patriotism against those who oppose it.
There are two methods by which intelligent
men may approach the problem of that
temperance which is the object of morality
in all matters — in wine, in war, in sex, in
patriotism ; that temperance which desires,
if possible, to have wine without drunken-
ness, war without massacre, love without
profligacy, and patriotism without Sir Alfred
Harmsworth. One method, advocated by
many earnest people from the beginning of
history, is what may roughly be called the
teetotal method ; that is, that it is better,
because of their obvious danger, to do with-
out these great and historic passions alto-
gether. The upholders of the other method
(of whom I am one) maintain, on the con-
trary, that the only ultimate and victorious
method of getting rid of the danger is
thoroughly to understand and experience
the passions. We maintain that with every

THE PATRIOTIC IDEA 7

one of the great emotions of life there goes
a certain terror, which, when taken with
imaginative reality, is the strongest possible
opponent of excess ; we maintain, that is to
say, that the way to be afraid of war is
to know something about war ; that the
way to be afraid of love is to know some-
thing about it ; that the way to avoid
excess in wine is to feel it as a perilous
benefit, and that patriotism goes along with
these. The other party maintains that the
best guarantee of temperance is to wear a
blue ribbon ; we maintain that the best
guarantee is to be born in a wine-growing
country. They maintain that the best
guarantee of purity is to take a celibate
vow ; we maintain that the best guarantee
of purity is to fall in love. They maintain
that the best guarantee of avoiding a reck-
less pugnacity is to forswear fighting ; we
maintain that the best guarantee is to have
once experienced it. They maintain that
we should care for our country too little to
resent trifling impertinences ; we maintain
that we should care too much about our
country to do so. It is like the Moham-
medan and Christian sentiment of tem-
perance. Mohammedanism makes wine a
poison ; Christianity makes it a sacrament.

Many humane moderns have a horror of
nationahty as the mother of wars. So in

8 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

a sense it is, just as love and religion are.
Men will always fight about the things they
care for, and in many cases quite rightly.
But there is another thing which should not
be altogether forgotten, and that is this :
that in so far as men increase in intelligence
they must see that a quite primary and
mystical affection is a foolish thing to put
into violent competition with another thing
of the same kind. Men may fight about a
rational preference, because there victory
may prove something. But an irrational
preference is far too fine a thing to fight
about, because there victory proves nothing.
When men first become conscious of
splendid and disturbing emotions, it is
their natural instinct, their first and most
natural and most reasonable instinct, to
kill people. Thus, for instance, the senti-
ment of romantic love went through the
same historical evolution as the sentiment
of patriotism. When a medieval knight
or troubadour realized that there was an
intensity in a pure and monogamous senti-
ment which was quite beyond anything
in merely animal appetites, he immediately
took a long spear and rushed round the
neighbourhood offering to kill anybody
who denied that he had fallen in love with
precisely the right person. I do not think
that it can be reasonably maintained that

THE PATRIOTIC IDEA 9

romantic love has decayed in the centuries
succeeding this ; what has happened has
been that people have perceived not that
love is too insignificant to fight about, but
that it is too important to fignt about.
Men have perceived, that is to say, that in
these matters of the afi'ections all combat is
ineffective, since no combatant would ever
accept its issue. Each of us thinks his own
country is the best in the world, just as
each of us might think his own mother the
best in the world. But when we think
this we do not proceed, or in the least
desire to proceed, to the bellicose test. We
do not set our mothers to fight each other
in an ampitheatre, and for the excellent
reason that if one mother overcame the
other mother, it would not make the least
difference to anybody. That is the only
serious objection to the institution of the
duel. That the duel kills men seems to
me a comparatively trifling matter ; foot-
ball and fox-hunting and the London
hospitals very frequently do that. The only
rational objection to the duel is that it
invokes a most painful and sanguinary
proceeding in order to settle a question, and
does not settle it. It is our belief, there-
fore, that the right way to avoid the
incidental excesses of patriotism is the
same as that in the cases of sex or war —

10 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS^ CLUB

it is to know something about it. Just as,
according to our view, there will always be
in some degree the power of sex and the use
of wine, so there will always be the pos-
|sibility of such a thing as patriotic war.
But just as a man who has been in love
w^ill find it difficult to write a whole frantic
epic about a flirtation, so all that kind of
rhetoric about the Union Jack and the
Anglo-Saxon blood, which has made amus-
ing the journalism of this country for the
last six years, will be merely impossible to
the man who has for one moment called up
before himself what would be the real
sensation of hearing that a foreign army
was encamped on Box Hill. The light and
loose talk about national victories impresses
those who think with me merely as a mark
of the lack of serious passion. The average
reasonable citizen, of whatever political
colour, would admit that such talk shows
too much patriotism. We should say that
it shows too little.

To the cosmopolitan, therefore, who pro-
fesses to love humanity and hate local
preference, we shall reply : * How can you
love humanity and hate anything so human ?'
If he replies that in his eyes local preference
is a positive sin, is only human in the sense
that wife-beating is human, we shall reply
that in that case he has a code of morality

THE PATRIOTIC IDEA 11

so different from ours that the very use of
the word * sin ' is almost useless between us.
If he says that the thing is not positive
sin, but is foolish and narrow, we shall reply
that this is a matter of impression, and that
to us it is his atmosphere which is narrow
to the point of suffocation. And we shall
pray for him, hoping that some day he will
break out of the little stifling cell of the
cosmopolitan world, and find himself in the
open fields and infinite sky of England.
Lastly, if he says, as he certainly will, that
it is unreasonable to draw the limit at one
place rather than another, and that he does
not know what is a nation and what is not, we
shall say : ' By this sign you are conquered ;
your weakness lies precisely in the fact that
you do not know a nation when you see it.
There are many kinds of love affairs, there
are many kinds of song, but all ordinary
people know a love affair or a song when
they see it. They know that a concubinage
is not necessarily a love affair, that a work
in rhyme is not necessarily a song. If you
do not understand vague words, go and sit
among the pedants, and let the work of the
world he done by people who do.' It is
better occasionally to call some mountains
hills, and some hills mountains, than to be
in that mental state in which one thinks,
because there is no fixed height for a

V2 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS^ CLUB

mountain, that there are no mountains in
the world.

II

Tolstoyanism, then, with all its earnest-
ness, with all its honourable lucidity, we
find, from our point of view, to be a frigid
and arbitrary fancy, incomparable in its
moral value to that intensity which has
bound living men to an actual and ancient
soil. It suffers in the comparison from the
profound sense that we have that the former
opinion is superficial, and the latter vital ;
that is to say, we have no doubt at all that
an ordinary man, born in England, might
profess himself a Tolstoyan and an opponent
of patriotism with every mark of reason and
sincerity ; we also have no doubt at all that
if he saw the Russian flag run up in
Trafalgar Square he would go white to the
lips. But this humanitarian theory of the
wrongness of the national sentiment, though
important, is by no means the most power-
ful opponent of that sentiment to-day.
Another force is in the field, which is by
its nature quite equally antagonistic to
patriotism, and which is, unlike the other,
equipped with power, with wealth, and with
a fair chance of triumph in practical poHtics.
This second enemy of patriotism is, I need
hardly say, the idea commonly called Im-

THE PATRIOTIC IDEA U

perialism. Imperialism seeks to destroy
patriotism, not by sketching a remote and
unattainable fusion between different peoples,
but by pointing out hoAV and where at a
particular moment such fusion may be made.
Imperialism is an opportunist cosmopoli-
tanism. It says in its rational moods (for
it has perfectly rational moods, and of these
only is it fair to speak) : * "We do not say we
would annex Spain for fun or pick a qutirrel
with Norway for the sake of doing so. But
wherever circumstances lead us more or less
naturally to the opportunity of effacing
a distinction, of pulling down a flag, of
destroying a nationality, we will do so.
Wherever we can turn some separate
kingdom or republic, with special memories
and symbols, into a part of the British
or Russian or German Empire, and make
it accept our memories and symbols, we
will do so. We believe that civilization is
on our side, and we enforce it against Fins
or Boers, against Poles or Irishmen. We
are Imperialists ; we are not the reckless
enemies of patriotism, but we are its
enemies.' That is the voice of sane and
educated Imperialism. I am aware that in
the late confusion of political parties the
cause of Imperialism was to some extent
strengthened by appeals to the immortal
sentiment of patriotism. But this is merely

14 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

one of those electioneering bewilderments
common in all practical politics, and espe-
cially in English politics. The patriotic
feeling is used in favour of Imperialism
just as the hatred of tyrants might have
been used against the French Revolution,
or the letter of the constitution against
Pym and Hampden — that is, used quite
honestly and with some reasonable signi-
ficance, but without any reference to the
real divisions between great ideas. It is
perfectly evident when we consider the
matter fundamentally that it is impossible
to have an Imperial patriotism ; that is
to say, it is impossible to have towards
a sprawling and indeterminate collection of
peoples of every variety of goodness and
badness precisely that sentiment which is
evoked in man, rightly or wrongly, by the
contemplation of the peculiar customs of
his ancestors and the peculiar land of his
birth. Of course, it is quite reasonable to
use as a metaphor such a phrase as having
a patriotism for the Empire, just as it is
permissible to use as a metaphor such
a phrase as having a patriotism of humanity,
or such a phrase as having fallen in love
with Rouen Cathedral. But the perfectly
legitimate sentiment which leads a man to
support, on political grounds, a huge cos-
mopolitan confederation has about as much

THE PATRIOTIC IDEA 15

resemblance to the passion which has made
men sing of and die for a strip of land as
an admiration for the architecture of Nor-
mandy has to the hunger in the heart of
Romeo. I am not saying at this point in
the discussion that this old and special
attachment to some individual soil or blood
is a correct sentiment. Perhaps the political
theory which unites Jews like Disraeli or
Germans like Lord Milner to a large modern
civilization is a more rational sentiment
than the old sentiment of patriotism. Per-
haps patriotism is a brutal fancy of primitive
man which it is posfftble for the world to
putgrow. All this I shall discuss later.
What I am concerned to point out at the
moment is the more or less self-evident fact
that this Imperial idea or plan for the con-
solidation and identification of an increasing
number of different commonwealths cannot
seriously be called patriotism according to
any sense that that word has ever actually
had among men. If patriotism does not
mean a defined and declared preference for
certain traditions or surroundings, it means
nothing whatever, j A thing like an empire,
like the Roman Empire, which contained
Greeks and Goths and ancient Britons ;
a thing like the British Empire, which
contains Dutchmen and Negroes and China-
men in Hong Kong, may be a perfectly

16 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

legitimate object of a certain kind of intel-
lectual esteem, but it is ludicrous to call
it patriotism, or invoke the ancient deities
of the hearth and the river and the hill.
There may be good reason for supporting
Mr. Beit in South Africa, but to ask us in
the name of patriotism to remember that he
is of our people is about as accurate as
asking us in the name of family feeling
to remember that he is our great -aunt.

Across the path of Imperialism as inter-
preted in a patriotic sense there lies the
most insurmountable of human obstacles, an
impossibility which is more than a political
and more than a financial impossibility — a
psychological impossibility. An empire
has all the characteristics that render
national attachments impossible. It is
huge, it is mostly remote, it is every-
where diverse and contradictory. Above all,
it is utterly undefined and unlimited. Not
to see how this frustrates genuine enthusiasm
is not to know the alphabet of the human
heart. There is one thing that is vitally
essential to everything which is to be in-
tensely enjoyed or intensely admired —
limitation. Whenever we look through
an archway, and are stricken into delight
with the magnetic clarity and completeness
of the landscape beyond, we are realizing
the necessity of boundaries. Whenever we

THE PATRIOTIC IDEA 17

put a picture in a frame, we are acting upon
that primeval truth which is the value of
small nationalities. Wherever we write or
read with pleasure the story of a man living
adventurously and happily upon an island,
we have hold of the truth which broke the
Roman Empire, and will always break
Imperialism. All Imperial poetry, even
the very best (as in the earlier work of
Rudyard Kipling) must be psychologically
false, for when a man really loves a thing
he dwells not on its largeness, but its
smallness. The very psychology of pat-
riotism is in the patriotism of Shakespeare,
above all in that hackneyed and admirable
passage in * Richard IL' which is the very
ecstasy of the little Englander. It is in-
describably significant that Shakespeare, in
glorifying his country, compares it to two
things — a fortress and a jewel —

* This precious stone, set in a silver sea,
Which serves it for the purpose of a wall.
Or as a moat defensive to a house.'

A fort is a thing which appeals both to
the boyish and the practical instinct as
characterized by a certain quality which can
only be called coziness. A jewel is a thing
the intense value of which is enhanced by
its being both rare and minute. A fortress
not upon its defence, a jewel multiplied over

2

18 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS^ CLUB

the earth like the pebbles of the shore,
changes the note of feeling finally and
beyond recovery. Imperialism is the open-
/ ing of Shakespeare's fort and the cheapening
of his jewel. Shakespeare was right in this
particular kind of love-poetry, as in all other
kinds. While the anemic moderns are
trying to evoke passion by raving about
size and space and eternity, the gigantic
Elizabethan remembers in the matter of
patriotism also the great psychological verity
that all love-poetry tends to diminutives.

It is instructive to compare this graphic
Little England patriotism of Shakespeare
with the best work of Mr. Rudyard Kipling.
That best work is very beautiful literature,
but it is always at its truest and most
beautiful when the writer is speaking of
cosmopolitanism, of the sensations of the
traveller in many lands. The point of John
of Gaunt'g utterance is that England satis-
fies ; the point of the ' Sestina of the
Tramp Royal' is that nothing satisfies,
hardly even the whole globe :

* Gawd bless this world ! Whatever she 'ath done,
Excep' when awful long I've found it good.
So write, before I die, " 'E liked it all !" '

That is real poetry, and sentiment too,
but it is the very reverse of patriotism. It
is the light and not inhumane melancholy

THE PATRIOTIC IDEA 19

of the man who has paid his vows to many
gods and many women. Shakespeare's pat-
riotism has the joy and pain of a passionate
lover ; Mr. Kipling's has the gaiety and sad-
ness of a philanderer among the nations.

Spiritually, then, we hold that a healthy
man does not demand cosmopolitanism, and ,
does not demand empire. He demands
something which is more or less roughly
represented by Nationalism. That is to' "j
say, he demands a particular relation to
some homogeneous community of manage-
able and imaginable size, large enough to /
inspire his reverence by its hold on history, ^
small enough to inspire his affection by its
hold on himself If we were gods planning
a perfect planet, if we were poets inventing
a Utopia, we should divide the world into
communities of this unity and moderate
size. It is, therefore, not true to say of us
that a cosmopolitan humanity is a far-off
ideal ; it is not an ideal at all for us, but a
nightmare.

And now, having this purely idealistic
faith in loyalties of this scope and groups
of this kind, we have to turn from pure
ethics and poetry to the discussion of the
earth as it is at this moment. Hitherto 1
have attempted to suggest that the national
idea is more noble and pleasing in the
abstract than either the cosmopolitan or the

2—2

20 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS^ CLUB

Imperial idea, if, indeed, Imperialism can be
imagined as anything but cosmopolitan.
But now let us turn to the practical people
— convertimur in gentes.

Now, having this belief, that communities
of a size much smaller than empires are the
healthy homes for men, that they are better
than either a cosmopolitan anarchy or Im-
perialism, we look out at practical history,
and discover a rather remarkable fact. We
discover that the civilization which has in
practical politics led the world has not only,
as a fact, branched or broken into com-
munities of this type, but has made the
outline and character of them a sacred thing.
Europe, which is the most practical civiliza-
tion, is also the only Nationalist civilization.
Imperialism is Asiatic. We see it at its
very best and most intellectual in a thing
like the Chinese civilization. In Europe
only is there this sense of the sanctity of a
nation. In other places men fight for the
independence of their own tribe. In our
Nationalist Europe only is there any notion
of respecting the independence of another
tribe. And this is, of course, the only test
of the existence of a religion. It is no
proof that a man holds life sacred that he
wishes to save his own life ; it is some proof
of it if , he refrains from murdering his
enemy. 'And this was the whole of our

THE PATRIOTIC IDEA 21

objection to the annexation of the Transvaal,
that it was a crime committed against the
European virtue of patriotism. For a man,
has clearly no more right to say that his
British patriotism obliges him to destroy
the Boer nation than he has to say that his
sense of the sanctity of marriage makes him
run away with his neighbour's wife. ^

There is undoubtedly a generaF notion
abroad at the present time that small
nationalities are dying out. There is a
general notion that empires are living or
destined to a continual life, that nationali-
ties are dead or destined to die. Such an
idea as this can only have arisen from
ordinary ignorance of the history of Europe.
It is true that empire often looks strong
and nationality often looks weak, but that
is merely because all the things that are
eternal always look weak. That simple
discovery has been the seed of all religions.

The practical truth is that the empires
have been the light and transient things,
brief as the butterfly ; the nations have
been the hard and solid and triumphant
things, which nothing could break. The
largest empire is really only a fashion.
But the smallest nation is something greater
than a fashion — it is a custom. Imperialism
is not either a glorious discovery of the
English, as some Englishmen think, or a

22 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

wicked invention of the English, as other
Englishmen think. It is a tiresome old
European fad or fashion, coming round to
us after having been tried and found want-
ing by nearly all the kindred nations.

It neither starts anything nor ends any-
thing : it merely recurs, like the crinoline.
But while Imperialism goes out and in, like
the crinoline, nationality remains, like the
habit of wearing clothes.

Spain was once a colonial empire, far
more brilliant and original than ours. Its
empire has vanished, but there are still
men who will die for Spain ; there are still
men who will strike you in the face if you
say that they are not Spaniards.

France had an empire covering all Europe
after the great ecstasy of the Revolution.
It vanished utterly, and all its ideas are at
a low ebb in Europe. But there are still
men who will die for France. And when
from our mortal nation also this immortal
fallacy is passed, when all the colonies of
England have gone the wild way of the
colonies of Spain, when some strange and
sudden Waterloo has made the little dream
of Beacon sfield as mad as the great dream
of Napoleon, something will remain, I am
very certain, which matters more than all
these levities. There will still be men who
will die for England.

THE PATRIOTIC IDEA 23

If any ordinary Englishman wishes to
feel the difference between the unreality of
Imperialism and the reality of I^ationalism —
I do not mind whether he is an Imperialist
or anything else — let him try one simple
test. Let him say first of all to himself
such a sentence as this : * It was largely
due to the influence of England that
Australia was ceded to Germany.' Such
a sentence will no doubt fill him with a not
illegitimate fury. He may rank it with
Majuba, and call it a scandalous example
of his country's weakness. But then let
him say to himself this sentence : * It was
largely due to the influence of Australia
that England was ceded to Germany.* He
will not think that means the weakness of
his country. He will think it means that
he has no longer any country to be weak.
He will not think that means Majuba, but
Ragnarok, the twilight of the gods.

It is just because our modern Imperialists
do not see the enormous abyss between tlie
claim of the nation and the claim of the
mere empire that their philosophy is so
superficial and so insincere. It is no ex-
aggeration at all to say that there is as
much diff'erence between asking an English-
man to give up his empire and asking him
to give up his England as there is between
asking him to alter the shape of his hat and

24 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

asking him to alter the shape of his head.
The two things lie geographically very near
together, and for persons with pedantic
minds the frontier between hat and head
may, for all I know, be the subject of
elaborate negotiation.

The people who live in our large towns,
and read our large newspapers — probably
the most credulous people who have ever
existed upon earth — have got an idea into
their heads that such things as the annexa-
tion of the Transvaal are parts of a normal
historic process. They believe that big
European empires have always been eating
up small European nations, just as whales
have always been eating up herrings. This,
again, is because they know no history.
When we come to look at the facts, the
really extraordinary thing is that the ab-
sorption of white nations should not have
happened oftener. In this wild and wicked
world the keenest Nationalist would expect
it often to happen, and often to succeed.

As a fact, it has seldom happened : it has
never succeeded. Fragments of nations
have been bitten off, as in Alsace and
Lorraine, and even those have not been
easy to chew. Wild tribes, in a chaotic
period, with no national sentiment at all in
the European sense — tribes such as existed
in Europe once, and exist in Asia still —

THE PATRIOTIC IDEA 25

have overrun and eaten up each other ; but
a nation is a thing quite different to these.

Some Christian nations have been swal-
lowed ; not one has ever been digested.
The chunks of Poland still lie heavy on
the stomachs of the Central Empires ;
Ireland has been a perpetual dyspeptic
pain. For living nations were not meant
by Nature to be our food.

In the whole circle of Christian history
and the Christian world there is one in-
stance, and one instance only, of a patriotic
European people living contentedly with
their Government transferred to another
capital. That instance is Scotland ; and if
ever there were on earth an exception that
proved the rule it is here, for Scotchmen
have held their heads up after absorption
for precisely the same reason that Switzers
hold their heads up after liberation — the
fact that they were never conquered. If
anyone wishes to make the case of the
Transvaal a parallel to the case of Scotland,
the step required is simple enough. Let
Edward VII. leave his crown to President
Steyn, and we will answer for the loyalty
of the Dutch in South Africa.

We contend, then, that this Nationalism
is, at any rate, an unbroken fact of our
Europe. It is no more probable that the
British Empire will outlast the patriotism

26 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS^ CLUB

of the Dutch in Africa than it was pro-
bable that the Spanish Empire would out-
last the patriotism of the Dutch in Europe.
Nations are tenacious, empires are slovenly.
And now we come to that other matter
which is important, the question of whether
empires, strong or weak, and nations, strong
or weak, do good or harm. In supporting
the Spanish Empire or the British Empire,
are we supporting something likely to do
good to mankind ? For, of course, we
should be quite willing in that case to side
with their weakness, and their forlorn hope
of resistance against the enduring tyranny
of nationality.

There is one faith which many good men
have in Imperialism which must not be
despised, but which must respectfully be
shattered. Many good men believe that
a great conglomeration of peoples, like the
British Empire, may be a unification of
varied merits. They believe that by it may
be extracted the best from the Sepoy, the
Australian, the Irishman, the Dutchman,
the negro, and the Cockney. All these,
they say, may thus grow in one orchard,
and civilization can gather the best fruit
from each.

Now, this kind of empire has many
beauties ; it is varied, fascinating, and in-
structive. But it has one defect : it does

THE PATRIOTIC IDEA 27

not exist. It is empliatically not true that
when we conquer peoples we get the good
out of them. So far from that, the reverse
is rather true : when we conquer peoples
we lose them for ever. Take an instance.
Nothing has more profoundly interested us
of late years, whether we are philosophers
or children, than the study of the great
mythologies. Nearly every baby is now
brought up among the gods of Greece and
the gods of Scandinavia. Many school-
boys could pass an examination as to who
was the uncle of Mercury or the second
cousin of Loki. We have ransacked every
cranny of Olympus and Asgard, and all
this time there existed in Europe another
great mythology, as vast and varied, as
powerful and as perfect.

The chief mark of such a great mythology
is that the mere phrases of it are enough to
establish its greatness. The mere phrase
' The Son of man ' is enough to prove
Christianity to be a great religion if no
other trace remained of the personality of
Christ. The mere phrase * The Twilight of
the Gods ' is enough to prove that the
Norsemen were poets and philosophers also.
And as clearly and certainly a whole
universe of primal imagination is revealed
by such a mere phrase as * The Country of
the Young.' And the mythology of which

28 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

' The Country of the Young ' is an example,
of which other examples are such unfathom-
able conceptions as the Secret Rose, or
the Black Boar, who in his brutal sim-
plicity typifies the primitive darkness of
things ; — where, in what corner of Europe,
in what crevice of the Caucasian moun-
tains, has this sumptuous mythology been
discovered ? It has been discovered in
Ireland. It has been discovered in that
country of all countries which was nearest
to us and most despised, which we con-
ceived as the withered limb of our Empire.
Why did w^e know so much about German
mythology and nothing about Irish mytho-
logy ? Any person with even the simplest
knowledge of the world as it is must realize
that the reason lies in the fact that our
material conquest of Ireland put us in an
utterly artificial position towards everything
Irish. The Irish would not sing to us any
more than the Jews, as described in their
stern and splendid psalm, would sing to
the Babylonians. I find it difficult to be-
lieve that there can be anyone so ignorant
of practical existence as not to know that
any attempt on the part of the Irish for
centuries after their conquest to say to us
what they had to say about their history
and legends would have been met with
nothing except jokes about Brian Baroo.

THE PATRIOTIC IDEA 29

We all know in reality that England would
never have consented to learn from Ireland.
It has learnt from France because it failed
to conquer her. If Edward III. or Henry Y.
had succeeded in adding France to the
Empire, we may be absolutely certain that
we should have learnt as little from the
song of Roland as we have from the legend
of Maive, and that we should have profited
as little from the genius of Mirabeau as we
did from the genius of Parnell.

Or take another instance on a somewhat
different plane. For centuries all European
nations, and England as much as any of
them, have been running round and round
the metaphysical problem of being, of pes-
simism and optimism, of variety and unity.
And all the time there existed in India an
immense and lucid philosophy which, true
or false, was, in the case of many English
philosophers, the very thing that they were
seeking ; in the case of many of them, the
very thing that they were saying. The
eighteenth century was full of sad specula-
tions and wild speculations ; but they
could not entertain quite so wild a specu-
lation as that their sad philosophy had been
reduced to its clearest elements by naked
brown men in the wilds of Asia. It is
strange to think that when poor Robert
Clive stood with the pistol in his hand, and

30 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

asked himself the value of life and death,
he might have learnt from some ragged
fakir, whom he treated as dirt, a pessimism
infinitely deeper and infinitely more rational
than his own. Englishmen could not find
it out, could not even realize that it was
there. The discovery of the greatest of all
philosophical schemes for the absorption of
personality was left for Schopenhauer, a
German. His hands were not tied with
the utter helplessness of empire.

Experience, then, is wholly against the
idea that by conquering a people we can
reach or use the good in them. The idea
that an empire absorbs the Irish qualities
when it conquers the Irish, or possesses the
Indian wisdom when it conquers India, is
one of the thousand delusions which are
characteristic of world politics. It is like
the notion of the cannibals that it is pos-
sible to become brave by eating a brave
man, or experts at horsemanship by eating
an elegant horseman. We can no more get
the secret of Chinese stoicism by annexing
China than a savage could become a good
actor by dining on Sir Charles Wyndham.
And the reason is very evident. The rela-
tions of a subject to a ruling race are in
themselves false relations, and neither can
know anything valuable of the other. They
are very like the relations a man bears to

THE PATRIOTIC IDEA 31

his footman or his housemaid. If anybody
told us that a duchess must know more of
the soul of the butler than of her personal
friends, because she saw the butler every
day, and there was only a floor between
them, we should not entertain a high
opinion of that person's knowledge of the
world. But it has never occurred to
us that this is the reason why we have
reaped profit from the French temperament,
and no profit from the Irish temperament.
The truth is, of course, that the friendship
of nations is like the friendship of indi-
viduals. No such thing is possible unless
both parties are free. National indepen-
dence is as much needed if peoples are to be
genuine friends as it is if they are to be
genuine enemies. Often as we have heard
of liberty, equality, and fraternity, we do
not remember enough that the two things
essential to fraternity are liberty and
equality.

The English people, who are upon the
whole the most generous people in the
world, have this defect in their generosity
— that they cannot be persuaded that there
are any people in the world who do not
want their commodities. In fact, the
English have a peculiar and even mystical
kind of generosity — a generosity which is
willing to give all its goods to the poor,

32 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

but cannot be persuaded to let the poor
keep the goods they have ah^eady. And
consequently, when we begin to speak of
self-government and independence and such
matters, the typical Englishman always
imagines that we mean a Parliament elected
on the English system, with green benches
and a Speaker wearing a wig ; and as he
imagines that this is the only possible kind
of self-government, he says, with perfect
truth, that no nation in the world has
done as much for self-government as the
English. It does not, however, seem to
occur to him that every Government that
ever existed in the world was a representa-
tive Government, and that every despot
was elected silently by universal suffrage.
Where a nation has a taste for politics, as
in England, its politicians represent it ; but
where it has a taste rather for war, let us
say, its warriors represent it ; and where it
has a taste for religious meditation, its
saints and hermits represent it. Even in
England, for instance, where we have some
love of politics, and may admit, therefore,
that Mr. Chamberlain represents us, we
have a much greater love of cricket, and
C. B. Fry represents us much better than
Mr. Chamberlain.

In the light of this principle our relation
to such a problem as that of the politics of

THE PATRIOTIC IDEA 33

India becomes clear. The reason why it is
undesirable to extend the franchise to the
Hindoos in India is not that it would raise
a rebellion or create a ridiculous spectacle,
but simply that representative Government
in India would not be representative. And
the reason that it would not be representa-
tive is simply this : that the political faculty
not being an Indian faculty, the politicians
who would dominate the country would be
the most un-Indian Indians who could be
found. No suffrage, however wide, no poli-
tical machinery, however faultless, could
make the spouting, ranting, Europeanized,
Bengali adventurer represent India. Nothing
could alter the^fact that he would despise
the ancient peasant-life of India, and the
ancient peasant-life, with a great deal more
justification, would despise him. The poli-
tical faculty would, of course, be cultivated
and brought, perhaps, to a high perfection by
certain Hindoos, but it would remain to the
eyes of India a unique and elegant and
somewhat unnecessary accomplishment.
The Bengali politicians would, under
whatever democratic forms, inaugurate in
India a rule of experts — that is to say, of
stupid and fanatical oppressors. India
would be about as much really democrat-
ized by such a scheme as England would
be if we had a General Election every three

3

34 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

years to clioose the man whom the great
soul of the people really believed to be the
best player on the trombone.

So that this essentially generous English
idea that we must provide all the parts of
the earth which we can influence with our
political institutions is dropped significantly,
and dropped, if one may say so, with a crash
at the first sight of the greatest British
problem, the problem of India. Face to
face with India, we are obliged to admit
that what is one nation's meat is another
nation's poison. And the moment we have
admitted that, we ha^'e broken at a blow
the whole conception of that extension of
Anglo-Saxon civihzation which is the essen-
tial of current Imperialism. If our poli-
tical institutions would not necessarily
improve or represent the Hindoo, then the
whole thing is a matter of local tempera-
ment, and it is quite as possible that our
political institutions never have improved
or expressed the Irishman, and never will
improve or express the Boer. It may be a
good thing, of course, in particular cases to
give our civilization to these people, but
it can no longer be maintained that it is
obviously a good thing to give it as it
is a good thing to give a loaf to a starving
man. The essential principle of National-
ism, that the institutions which are the

THE PATRIOTIC IDEA 35

growth of the soil have an advantage as such,
is admitted.

Ill

Civilization is a good thing, but it is not
a thing like the love of God, by its nature
infinite. A man may have too much
civilization, as he may have too much beer,
and the supreme evil of civilization may be
expressed in one single phrase. It consists
in permitting the human achievements to
outrun the human imagination. A man
possesses what he can think of, and not an
atom more. If a man with twelve thousand
millions a month received thirteen thousand
millions instead, not a farthing would really
have been given to him, for he could not
even imagine the difference. Similarly, if
a citizen of an empire already containing
numberless alien and incomprehensible
peoples has added to his heritage another
alien and incomprehensible people, no differ-
ence has really been made. A man is a
citizen of that commonwealth the nature of
which he can conceive, and of no other. If
that commonwealth is only a street out of
the Blackfriars Road, that street is his
country, and for that he ought to wear
ribbons or shed his blood.

The danger of small commonwealths is
narrowness, but their advantage is reality.

3—2

\1

36 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

Now, at any specific stage in the world s
history we ought to ask ourselves whether
humanity is in a greater danger from the
narrow arrogance of small people, or from
the phantasmal delusions of empires. That
is the question which confronts the serious
European of to-day, and the answer is not
very difficult. It is idle to tell him that
Nationalism is sometimes an evil in the con-
fusion of a heptarchy, when the fact stares
him in the face that the modern evils arise
from remoteness, from unreality, from the
circulation of wealth far from its producers,
from the waging of wars far from the seat
of action, from the wild use of statistics,
from the crude use of names, from the
investor and the theorist, and the absentee
landlord.

We have reached in the modern world a
condition of such appalling unreality that
everything is done on paper. Men know
the destiny of countries when they have
never met a native, and professed love and
hatred for men whom, if they saw them in
the street, they could not tell from Poles or
Portuguese. For this immense theoretic
method of modern times they have invented
an admirable jDhrase — a phrase that ex-
presses with a searching accuracy and irony
of which they are quite unconscious the
nature of their political occupation. They

THE PATRIOTIC IDEA 37

have called it ' painting the map red.' Like
children, they are wholly concerned with
the colours in an atlas. So long as they
can paint the map red they are quite con-
tented that the countries depicted there
should retain until doomsday their own
alien and inexhaustible colours of forest and
field.

There is a decadence possible for our
modern civilization, and it is just at this
point that my difference from the Im-
perialists comes in. They think Impe-
rialism (otherwise Cosmopolitanism) is the
cure. I think that Imperialism (otherwise
Cosmopolitanism) is the disease. I ignore
for the moment the question of whether, in
the abstract, combinations and centraliza-
tions and steamboats and Marconi wires
are good things or bad. But to attempt to
cure the evil of Birmingham and save the
soul of Chicago by more combinations and
centralizations and more steamboats and
more ^larconi wires seem to me stark
lunacy ; it is like a doctor ordering brandy
to a man in delirium tremens. It is precisely
from these things that we are suffering, from
a loose journalism, from a vague geography,
from an excitable smattering of everything,
from an officious interest in everybody,
from a loss of strong national types, of
strong religious restraints, of the sense of

38 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

memory and the fear of God. We are not
suffering from any very painful or danger-
ous resemblance to the arrogant and cruel
zealots who ruled in Sparta or died in the
fall of Jerusalem. We are suffering from a
resemblance to the mob in decaying Rome.

Is there anyone to-day who can reason-
ably doubt that what led us into error in
our recent South African politics was pre-
cisely our Imperialism, and not our
Nationalism ? was precisely not our
ancient interest in England, but our quite
modern and quite frivolous interest in
everywhere else ? Millions of instances
might be quoted to show how utterly at
sea we were and are still about the soul of
South Africa. It is as well, perhaps, to
concentrate them into two examples.

President Kruger and Mr. Cecil Rhodes
had both great talents, great ambitions, and
exciting lives ; they both had many sincere
sympathizers in England, and each one of
them at the supreme crisis of his life did
things which mystified and appalled their
English supporters. No English Rhodesian
could ever defend the Raid ; no English
Pro-Boer has ever explained the Ulti-
matum. The reason is that neither Rhodes
nor Kruger w^ere English politicians. We
cannot understand them; probably they
understood each other.

THE PATRIOTIC IDEA 39

It is true that it is sometimes alleged
that such things as telegraphy and journal-
ism have really abolished distance. This is
not only an error, but a horribly dangerous
one. Telegraphy and journalism can in-
deed convey some things easily, but these
are precisely the things that do not matter
— the mere names, dates, and incidents.
At the worst, journalism supplies us with
falsehoods ; at the best, only with facts.
And facts, taken apart from their atmo-
sphere, local sentiment, and place in life, are
quite as false as falsehoods. We know that
a man is shot by a Boer policeman ; but
what is the use of knowing that ? What
w^e need to know is whether the thing was
typical, whether it was exceptional, whether
it was planned, whether it was excused,
whether it was excusable. We want to
know whether it was a thing like a German
duel or a thing like a Whitechapel murder.
And all this we could only know by living
in the community. Our newspapers could
not tell it to us, even if our newspapers
were honest.

Or take the instance of newspapers them-
selves. How can that subtle thing, the
prestige of a newspaper, be felt, except at
close quarters ? We know that the editor
of the Canadian Tomahawk has impeached
Lord Dundonald, but what ordinary English-

40 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

man will be dishonest enough to pretend
that he knows whether this means the
Times or the Daily Express? We shall
never know how much of a fool Mr.
Chamberlain may have made of himself
over the French caricatures of Queen
Victoria, because we do not live in France,
and feel the flavour and position of Le
Rive. But how great a fool he may, per-
haps, have made of himself we can easily
imagine by supposing that the Kaiser made
a speech to-morrow calling on God and his
brave Brandenburg because there had been
a paragraph about him in Modern Society.

We must at all costs get back to smaller
political entities, because we must at all
costs get back to reality. We must get
nearer and nearer again to love and hate
and mother- wit, to personal judgments and
the truth in the faces of men. As it is, the
game of world-politics is an enormous game
of cross purposes. In the fantastic sunset
of a decadence the shadows of men are far
larger than themselves.

President Roosevelt is accepted in
England as something much greater than
he is in America. Mr. Seddon is taken
much more seriously by Mr. Chamberlain
than he is by New Zealand. The really bad
work of Cecil Rhodes was not his influence
on colonial politicians, whom he understood,

THE PATRIOTIC IDEA 41

but his influence on English gentlemen,
whom he could not understand.

It is characteristic of this vast bewilder- \
ment which we call world-politics that it
so constantly leaves out of account the most
important matters even in its own line.
For instance, it perpetually tells us that the
English race has a talent for colonization,
and adjures it to find fresh continents and
fresh islands in the seas of sunset or dawn.
Yet there is one island which the English
could colonize most easily, and which they
are not permitted to colonize — England.
In England alone, among all modern coun-
tries, the English people are imprisoned
between hedges and driven along rights-of-
way. England does not belong to them at
all; belongs to them far less than the Trans-
vaal before the war belonged to the Uit-
landers. And it is in the main that very
class whose immense and absurd estates
make impossible the colonization of England
which urges the English people to colonize
something else, preferably something on the
other side of the world. These owners very
naturally desire what they call a spirited
foreign and colonial policy. They desire
that every lonely old theocratical State from
the Transvaal to Thibet should be invaded
by the English ; for all these enterprises
put oflp the dreadful day when the English i
shall invade England. J

42 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

But do not let us admit for a moment
that in thus turning English loyalty to
England we are serving merely England or
ourselves. We are taking the turn which
our great Christian civilization must take if
it is to live. It is an old civilization, and it
is for a season tired — tired of civilization,
tired of cheap culture, tired of scepticism,
tired of talk, tired of hearsay, tired, in a word,
of Imperial politics. And it must return,
as it did in the adoption of Christianity, to
intensity and humility, to a devotion to
particular things. About our European
Imperialism let us remember primarily one
thing, that it has all happened before. The
end of the world happened a thousand years
ago. At the end of the Roman era every-
thing that was Roman seemed to have gone
stale for ever. The world was with infinite
agony made young again, because there
were some tribes the Empire had never
conquered, and some Scriptures that it
had never read. The Empire and the
continent were just saved by the failures
of Imperialism. Strange religions came
out of the virgin East, strange races came
out of the virgin North, and became useful
because they had been neglected. Such
was the issue of the happy failure of Im-
perialism ; the human mind dares scarcely
imagine its success. Who can face the

THE PATRIOTIC IDEA 43

notion of a power which has destroyed
everything but itself suddenly growing
sick of itself ? What pessimist could have
pictured the great Empire, at the very
instant when it had discovered Roman
roads and Roman trophies to be vanity,
stretching out its arms to the East and to
the West, and finding nothing but its own
intolerable omnipresence — finding nothing
but Roman trophies and Roman roads ?

THE ENGLISH CITY

By C. F. G. Masterman

CHATEAUBRIAND, in his Memoirs,
describes an incident at a banquet
with the Prime Minister, when, as Ambas-
sador to the Court of St. James, he revisited
the city through which he had once wandered
outcast and alone. * Lord Liverpool him-
self had sad forebodings. I dined with him
one day. After dinner we talked at a
window overlooking the Thames. Down
the river we saw a portion of the city, the
bulk enlarged in the smoke and fog. I
praised to my host the solidity of the
English monarchy, kept in balance by the
even swing of liberty and power. The
venerable peer, rising and stretching out his
arm, pointed to the city, and said : '^ What
sense of solidity can there be with these
enormous cities ? A sudden insurrection
in London, and all is lost." '

Meditating later upon all the extraordinary
changes he had seen, this strange genius, so
clear-sighted through all his rhetoric and
U

THE ENGLISH CITY 45

his vanity, caught some prophetic vision of
the changes, still more extraordinary, which
were to create in a moment of time a new
earth. ^ Caught between two ages, as in the
conflux of two rivers,' the * eye-witness of
lapsed worlds/ he could discetn a mutation
far more momentous than the thunder of
the revolution and all the surging shocks of
war. The largest secular upheaval since the
passing of mankind from nomadic to pastoral
life was silently transforming the life of
humanity. As if by the handiwork of
some unseen wizard, men were suddenly
forsaking the fields and hurrying into the
narrow streets of the cities. Amorphous,
agitated masses were hastily heaping them-
selves into coagulations of a remote and
obscure existence. Chateaubriand him-
self was not ashamed to express his dis-
quietude at this change. All the memories
of the magical early days in the forests of
Brittany rose up in protest against the unrest
and noise and squalor of the life of the
coming generations. ' Was there nothing in
the life of old,' he protests — * nothing in that
limited space upon which you looked out
from your ivy-framed casement ? It was
happiness to think that the hills which sur-
rounded you would not disappear before
your eyes ; that they contained your friend-
ships and your loves ; that the moan of the

46 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

night wind around your dwelling would be
the only sound to which you would fall
asleep; that never would your soul's soli-
tude be disturbed. You knew where you
were born ; you knew where lay your
grave/

But ' in the life of the city all is tran-
sitory.' Civilization, all high tradition,
religion itself, would be swept under in that
turbulent flood. With the death of hope
for the future would come an ever more
insistent impatience with the irregularities
of the present. Tell a man that this life is
all; that there are good things in it from
which he is ever to be divided ; that his
function is but to toil, while the function of
others is to enjoy : ' as a last resource you
will have to kill him.'

Time has but justified the diagnosis with-
out lessening the menace of these sombre
visions of disturbance. The transition of
the people from the country to the cities is
the keynote to the large changes of the
present. And the spectre of a discontent
bred within their dim labyrinths ; of the
demands of a race keenly educated for in-
telligence and enjoyment, rejecting all the
old supernatural sanctions and promises of
a coming restitution, stimulated by the
desire that the short years of their allotted
lives shall be something other than a joy-

THE ENGLISH CITY 47

less sowing for another's harvest, is the
spectre which broods over all the horizons
of Europe at the opening of a new century.

It is in England that this process of
change has reached its furthestr development.
In England the cities are most monstrous,
and black, and disorganized ; and the aggre-
gations which sprawl at the mouths of the
rivers or amid the wastes of the manufactur-
ing districts most effectually challenge the
advocate of any life that is secure, and
passionate, and serene. These aggregations
are something new in the history of things,
to w^hich no former time can furnish any
precedent or parallel. Far away on the dim
horizons of history we can discern the little
walled town, gathered round church or
castle, with its high roofs and towers and
swinging bells. London is in the Middle
Ages a monstrous city. In Tudor times,
with a population of less than a quarter of
a million, the cry of alarm is raised. * Lest
London be too great to fear God and honour
the King ' is the echo of an age when, as
King James remonstrated, ' England will
shortly be London, and London England.'
A century later the number of its people
has swollen to half a million, and the old
structure of organized city life is becoming
submerged in the gathering flood of
humanity. Yet there was little expectation

48 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

of the progress of the days to come. In
the time of Pepys the enormous size of
Bristol, then the second city in the kingdom
(with a population of nearly 30,000 souls),
was a source of continual wonder and
admiration. Pepys himself was struck by
its greatness, but, as Macaulay says, ' his
standard was not high, for he noted down
as a wonder the circumstance that in Bristol
a man might look around him and see nothing
but houses.'

Another century passes, and at the dawn
of the nineteenth in England the population
of London is not yet doubled. The city
that loomed so menacing in the mist in
Chateaubriand's vision contained less than
a million persons. But now the unseen
player has given a quick turn to the
game. New forces are urging the peoples
into a sudden restlessness. One hundred
years later the population has multiplied
itself sevenfold, and still shows no check to
its impetuous increase. Houses are piled
on houses high into the smoky skies ; the
lines of mean dwellings and huddled streets
push out over the marshes to the eastward,
and climb the hill to the north and south ;
and ever sounds on all the highways the
tramp of innumerable footsteps as the vast
host marches into the 6ity labyrinth and is
lost in its multitudinous mazes. In the

THE ENGLISH CITY 49

little old town by the river the ancient
fortress and abbey church, with all their
immemorial traditions of the old life of
England, look down upon a vast and tossing
sea of human habitations — such a spectacle
as has never before been seen since the land
rose from its encompassing seas and earth
became convenient for the abodes of men.

This growth is not unaccompanied by
death. While the city is developing into
articulate life, the countryside is passing
into decay. Time, that changes all good
and evil things, is making out of the ruins
of the old a newer England.

The life of old England is the life of the
village. In those little scattered communi-
ties amid the fields and great forests were
beaten out those national qualities of
tenacity, jollity, and rude vigour which will
for ever be associated with the men of
* Merrie England.' All through the twi-
light of the Middle Age, and even after
the desolations of the great pillage, we can
discern these gatherings of Christian folk,
leading their laborious life, with the old
songs, and the old pieties, and the old con-
stant endurance under rainy skies. From
the village more than a century ago
came those swarms of workmen whose
eager energy gave England the long unchal-

4

50 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

lenged supremacy of the Industrial Revolu-
tion. In the village was bred the dogged
determination which fought Europe in arms,
and crowned this little island in its cold
northern seas with imperishable memories,
Albuera, Trafalgar. And it was village
England which sent out that great exodus
of wanderers who departed, courageous, to
build up new nations beyond the ocean,
and scatter her children around the seven
seas.

In the lifetime of one generation, in that
Victorian age which even now we are begin-
ning to see as one of the most astonishing
periods in the world's history, the change
was effectually accomplished. Here figures
— the mere bald statistic of census returns —
speak louder than any impassioned rhetoric.
The old England which acclaimed its young
Queen nearly seventy years ago has passed
away for ever. London of nearly 2,000,000,
England and Wales of 16,000,000, scattered
in villages and small towns, still for the most
part agricultural — such w^as the England of
1840. To-day ' London ' is 6,500,000, the
towns number 25,000,000, the country
7,500,000, much of which is, strictly speak-
ing, urban also. England to-day, that is to
say, is 77 per cent, urban against 23 per
cent, rural ; and the greater part of this
' urban ' is heaped up into gigantic aggrega-

THE ENGLISH CITY 61

tions of population, of which London is the
crown.

The comparisons of the census figures of
1891 and 1901 show this process ever
hurrying forward with unchecked rapidity —
the great towns leaping forward into num-
bers which defy interpretation, the village life
of England in long-drawn-out, peaceful
progress towards extinction. The process
is indeed partly concealed by the classifica-
tion as ' rural ' of everything extra- urban.
And so the total figures of some rural dis-
tricts show no decrease ; and ingenious
statisticians have endeavoured to demon-
strate that the decline in the country is not
absolute but relative, that the change has
merely been to heap the increase of popula-
tion into the towns. Detailed examination
of the figures disproves these assertions.

In the long list of actual declines of
population in the rural districts the un-
animity is occasionally broken by a sudden
leap upwards. But in practically every
case this is due to special causes, to proxi-
mity to large towns, to mining districts,
to the development of watering-places and
health resorts. Remove these, as in fairness
they must be removed from estimation of the
old country life of England, and the record
is but a list of increasing diminution of popu-
lation— figures more eloquent than words.

4—2

52 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

Thus in the list we find the Croydon
' rural ' district with an increase of 9,000,
the Dartford with an increase of 6,000,
Chesterfield with an advance of 10,000, or
the Isle of Thanet with 2,000. All these
and similar cases must be deducted from the
estimation of rural England. Here is the
real material of the old life, the figures for
such a county as Suffolk. The Ipswich
sub-district increased 10,000, the Wood-
bridge 2,000, the Lowestoft 8,300. The
remainder is rural Suffolk :

Blything

+ 183

Stow

765

Risbridge

- 1,258

Hartismere -

1,178

Sudbury

- 2,560

Hoxne

1,241

Cosford

- 730

Bosmere

823

Thingoe

- 1,215

Samford +

296

Bury

- 375

Plomesgate -

1,036

Mildenhal

1 - 298

Wangford -

413

And this in ten years ! A similar record
could be compiled in any rural district
from Norfolk to Devon or Cheshire to Kent.
* Rural England,' it has been said, ' is bleed-
ing at the arteries, and it is the best blood
that is flowing away.'

What is the meaning ? It means, on the
one hand, that the great towns are drinking
up the best life of the country — the energetic,
the ambitious, the enterprising pouring into
the whirlpool and disappearing in its tre-
mendous turmoil. It means also that the
process cannot indefinitely continue. If the

THE ENGLISH CITY 53

villages were stationary in number one
might regard with equanimity or satisfaction
the breeding of a population steadily in-
vigorating the broken, congested crowds of
the city. But the villages are not station-
ary : they actively decline not only relatively/
to the town, but in absolute numbers. ^

The time is coming when these aggrega-, n
tions will seek the renewal of the country
life, and seek it in vain — when the city will,
as it were, be compelled to turn in upon
itself and find from its own city-bred chil-
dren the energetic impulses which hitherto
it has sucked up from all the fertile fields.
With a deserted land studded with a few
country houses and shooting centres, each
supporting a semi - parasitic population ;
villages of old men and women, the lame,
the tired, the mentally vacant ; the fields,
as now in parts of Essex, passing back
' to the condition of waste and veldt,*
w^here ' the down of the thistles in the
month of August may be seen blowing all /
over the country like a snowstorm'; and*
the English people collected in great lumps
and blotches of population, with glare and
noise and heated, crowded life, can we
anticipate anything but a profound and
fundamental upheaval in all the charac-
teristics which we have hitherto associated
with the old life of the island race ?

54 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

The peasant in the field, bent over his
labour in the noontide sunshine, return-
ing to rest and welcome sleep after the long
toil of the day ; — here is the unchanging
picture which is the background of all his-
tory. He is there at the dim dawn when
the Briton fought the Saxon invader, before
Augustine brought into England a faith
which was to overthrow all the older gods.
Seedtime and harvest have passed over
him, the gathering warmth, the gathering
cold ; and want and pestilence, and dark
days and bright, war at home and war
beyond the sea, the changing thought and
the changing customs of men through all
the years and the centuries. The noise
and hurry and dust have hidden him for
a time from sight ; but immediately the
cloud has passed he has been revealed again,
with bowed head, laborious, in the sweat of
his brow eating bread. Suddenly, in these
latter days, he has raised himself from the
ground, arrested by some compelling appeal.
He is seen there, standing for an instant,
listening to the voice which has called him
from beyond the boundaries of his world.
A moment later he is gone : and the place
which has seen his toil for centuries hence-
forward will know him no more. The
plough stands idle in the furrow. A silence
falls upon the deserted fields. In the

THE ENGLISH CITY 55

village inn a few old men, whose number
each cold wind diminishes, gather in silence
round the time-worn table, dimly wonder-
ing what these things may mean. They
know not that the Seven Sleepers in their
eastern cavern have again stirred uneasily
in their slumber : that the world of which
they were a part has vanished, a world in
which they have no place or portion has
been bom.

Whither do they go, these wanderers from
the homes of their fathers ? The census
of birthplaces tells the tale. Here is the
* Great Wen,' with the ' frantic arithmetic of
its untliinkable population ' sucking in the
people as the furnace blast the straws of the
floor. Within the administrative area of
London we find numbers from different
counties which would make great town-
ships : 320,000 from the South-Eastern
Counties, 220,000 from the South Midland,
nearly 200,000 from the Eastern, 150,000
from remote Devonshire and Cornwall.
Scotland contributes 50,000, Ireland 10,000
more ; 34,000 are from little Wales, 150,000
aliens from beyond the sea. So the heart
of the Empire levies its tribute — a tribute
of the picked life of man and maiden — from
all the lands subject to its sway.

The population of * London ' shows an in-

56 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

crease in ten years of but 308,000. But
this merely attests the existence of a
boundary which has become artificial. In-
stead of, as formerly, embracing the whole
town and the open fields, this boundary
now runs through homogeneous districts,
and divides one side of a street from the
other. London, like a swelled pudding,
has swollen and splashed beyond its en-
velope— into Essex and Kent and Hert-
fordshire and Surrey. In these outside
regions, in which some marsh or vacant
field has suddenly leapt into a stratifica-
tion of houses and an active and busy
township, resides the real insistent problem
of the future. London, indeed, presents
many of the phenomena of the Concen-
tration Camp. Order can be created out of
chaos — is laboriously created out of chaos
— till a sudden influx of new immigrants
breaks down the organization under the
strain.

In the ten years, within the county
Streatham and Tooting have grown from
49,000 to 88,000, Woolwich from 107,000
to 131,000 ; but outside the increase be-
comes almost incredible. Hornsey has
sprung from 44,000 to 71,000, Leyton
from 63,000 to 98,000, Walthamstow from
46,000 to 95,000, Willesden from 61,000
to 114,000, East Ham (whoever has ever

THE ENGLISH CITY 67

visited East Ham ?) — most astonishing —
from 32,000 to 96,000 in teji years. It is
as the growth of cities in the Far West of
America : the town springs up as in a night.
These are the populations every obscure
individual of which has a life to live, to
himself momentous, infinite.

Sidelights are flashed by the bulky census
tables upon some features of this new obscure
city life. The influx is, as in the historic
example of the river, a continued natural
process of segregation ; the debris from the
distant hills, as the current becomes slower
and more sluggish, being deposited in suc-
cessive layers of separation. In the great
marshes of the east a gigantic city of toilers
spreads fan-like forward as it eats up the
fields ; along the hills of the south gather
a succession of townships of clerks and
villa - dwellers ; ^ in the west and north-
west wealth and leisure still remains un-
conquered. The servant statistics tell the
tale. In the Borough of Shoreditch 5^ per
cent, of the families keep servants, in Ken-
sington 80 per cent., in H amp stead 81 per
cent., in Bermondsey 6^ per cent. Or a
similar result is revealed by the tenement
figures ; 80 per cent, of dwellings of less
than five rooms in Stepney, 85 in Shore-
ditch, contrasted with 42 in Wandsworth
or 31 in Lewisham. A variation in death

58 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

rate from 18 to 34 per thousand reveals the
toll of years exacted by the city : the city
which presents a gaunt problem of its
future to all sanguine minds as it extends
its borders — * an awful place/ * full of life,
and full of death/

So in dark days and bright, while men
work and while men sleep, the new pro-
blem, the problem of the city race, rises
into dim outline. What form of new
existence is being bred in this vast wilder-
ness ? In the midst is the noise of labour
and the play of children ; there are sug-
gestions of physical deterioration, of stunted
growth, and failing forces of resistance to
disease and decay ; there are occasional
warnings of a new danger, of a race which
prowls at night along the lamp-lit streets,
of the hordes of wanderers which ever move
up and down along all the city ways.
Around its borders are studded the gigantic
buildings, palaces or prisons, which witness
to its efforts to grapple with the problems
of maimed and distorted life — witness both
to its energy and to its failure. The broken,
the rebellious, the lunatic, the deserted
children, the deserted old, are cooped up
behind high gates and polished walls ; and
still the number increases as the net sweeps
through the streets and drags out its cap-

THE ENGLISH CITY 59

tives. Beyond the borders also are all
the gigantic graveyards, where now lie so
quietly under the long grasses the armies
of the forgotten dead ; mourned for a
moment,' and then huddled very speedily
away from the active life of the living ; that
no longer than may be, by their meekness
and their silence, shall these be questioning
the profit of all this hot striving after
transitory things.

How far — how stupendously far — has
man thus passed from that old life which
Chateaubriand pictured ! * You knew where
you were born ; you knew where lay your
grave.' The little red-roofed houses crept
round the village church, which proclaimed
a judgment of all passing things ; and
round it also, the dead near to the living,
was the abode of those resting now through
all the centuries, whose blood still beat
ardent in the men of a day. Here in the
vanished years, as each generation flowered
and faded, were performed the central sym-
bols of human life as, unhurried, it passed
from one to another eternity. Here the
child received its name and admission into a
fellowship stretching beyond the boundaries
of its world. Here, later, with extrava-
gance of rejoicing, man was married to
maiden ; here, at the evening, with extra-
vagance of sorrow, both were laid in sleep.

60 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

Over all brooded the petition for the prayer
of the passing stranger ; that the place
of those whose hearts once beat so high
with passionate desire, should at the last
be found in peace.

II

The relation of politics to civilization in
its wider aspect is a subject of discussion
which at such periods of change as the
present becomes deliberately insistent. How
far, if at all, and if at all, how desirably,
can the expression of human hopes and
ideals be embodied in legislation ? To
what extent is it possible to stimulate or
discourage those large impersonal forces,
economic, social, spiritual, which hurry
mankind from one condition of order to
another, through all the painful interme-
diate processes of development and decay ?
Is all effort vain which essays by wise com-
munal action to mitigate the attendant
confusion and pain by which such processes
are accompanied ? Nay, more, is it foolish
to imagine that the whole process itself
may be estimated and controlled, directed
towards ends far removed from the natural
consummation of its courses ? Is man, no
less in the creation of the days to come

THE ENGLISH CITY 61

than within the limits of his single transi-
tory life, ' the master of his fate ' ?^

In England progress and civilization
seem to have advanced along divergent
roads. The old order has perished, the
new has scarcely blossomed into active and
intelligible life. Under an appearance of
tranquillity men discern elements of waste
and disorder, pregnant with profound dis-
quietude. With some impatience the
demand is becoming vocal for the concern
of legislation, and a rational control in the
making of the new England from the ruins
of the old. To some observers the change
excites only a lament over a past that is
for ever gone. They mourn the vanishing
of a vigorous, jolly life, the songs of the
village alehouse, existence encompassed by
natural things and the memories of the
dead — the secure and confident life of
'Merrie England.' To others, again, the
change is one charged w^ith a menace to
the future. They dread the fermenting, in
the populous cities, of some new, all-power-
ful explosive, destined one day to shatter
Into ruin all their desirable social order.
In these massed millions of an obscure life,
but dimly understood and ever increasing

* The later portion of this essay has already
appeared in the Independent Review^ and is now-
reprinted by kind permission of the Editorial Council.

62 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

in magDitude, they behold a danger to
security and all pleasant things. Like the
poet when he shivered in the Roman sun-
light at a breath from the cold north, from
beyond the confines of a world, they appre-
hend forces destined to consummate the end
of an Age. The cry goes up, as foretold
by Mazzini : * The Barbarians are at our
gates.' To others the problem is one of
race and efficiency. They see England
ruling the Empire, the cities ruling Eng-
land. Upon the life developing in the
twilight world of the cities is dependent
that empire's prosperity or decline. They
become concerned with statistics of birth-
rate, infant mortality, physical degenera-
tion ; they call for the breeding of an
Imperial race. To others, again, and in
particular to those familiar with the effects
of disorder, poverty, and pain upon indivi-
dual lives, the problem takes upon itself
a more human aspect. From their own
experience amongst their friends, they
translate the statistics into terms of human
wretchedness, privation, and desire. They
are resentful of acquiescence in the passing
of so many lives in gray shadow, in the
failure, in the case of the many, of the
attainment of anything worthy of being
termed a civilization. They are often pas-
sionate against preventable suffering, the

THE ENGLISH CITY 63

clumsiness of the destruction of human
possibilities, the use of so many lives each
as a means and never as an end. They
question the justice of a social order which
condemns common humanity to a region
of random endeavour ; which accepts the
destruction of so much * by-product,' when
that 'by-product' is the endowment and
natural happiness of so many men and
women and children ; which proclaims, as
the best that it can make of its working
peoples, the restless, uninspired toil of
England's great cities, as the finest flower
of its civilization the tenement dwelling,
the workhouse, the gaol. And they plead,
sometimes in harsh accents, always with a
great longing, for the interest and attention
of all classes in the community — for legis-
lation once again to concern itself with the
forgotten art of the common welfare, to
hasten the coming of the newer day.

And although the end is not yet, and the
ultimate social changes will be such as no
man can foresee, there are certain modest and
direct measures of reform w^hich could be
pushed through, even in the lifetime of a
Parliament. Social reconstruction cannot
consider one-half of the problem without
the other. The solution of the haunting
problems of the city may yet be found in
the vanishing life of the fields.

64 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

All efforts at remedy in this life must
recognise that the old agricultural system of
England, with its tripartite division of profits
to landlord, farmer, and labourer, its docile
serf population of ill-paid toilers, is gone
for ever. The peasant refuses to stay with
the status and wages of a day labourer
while the city calls to his ambitions and his
dreams. Many of the suggested remedies
of * agricultural depression ' are futile, be-
cause they fail to recognise this bed-rock
fact. Of such is Protection, designed to
give increased rent to the landlord, profit to
the farmer, higher wages to the labourer.
But such wages, even if obtainable, would
in no way counteract, in the young and
energetic, the glamour of the town. The
kernel of the situation is not that agricul-
ture does not pay — it still pays well enough
in places — but that the labourer will not
stay on the fields. All that is self-reliant
and active immediately forsakes the village
for the town. Work is being carried on, in
some half-hearted fashion, by the old men
and children ; on the passing of the present
generation there will be none to fill their
places. All the adventitious attractions
desperately designed to bolster up the
present system would merely result in a
prolongation of the agony. Provision of
labourers' cottages could not pay with the

THE ENGLISH CITY 65

present rate of wages ; if provided at the
expense of the local authority, they would
be but grants-in-aid of the local farmers,
advanced from the rates. Allotments at
which the agricultural labourer can work
before or after his already sufficient toil are
but the expedient of the doctrinaire ; village
libraries, changes in the education of rural
schools, amusements, lectures, nigger enter-
tainments, the suggestions of despair.
Unless the deep-rooted and fundamental
nature of the disease be estimated, no /
adequate remedy can be devised. '

Only ^wo large possibilities remain as
alternatives to the passing of the land into
twitch and thistle, and the coming of a vast
silence upon the deserted fields. The one
is the system of the * model * village.
Wealth made in the town or beyond the sea
is poured into the countryside; a new cos-
mopolitan aristocracy effects an imitation or
caricature of the old feudal life ; lavish ex-
penditure creates a parasitic class of game-
keepers, lodgekeepers, gardeners, well-fed
and deferential peasants, designed to increase
the picturesqueness of the landscape. The
wild animal of La Bruyere's vision, black,
livid, all burnt by the sun, has become the
sleek, well-fed ox, ruminating, with patient
eyes. The ot;her, to which that little com-
pany who believe first in freedom will turn

5

m PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

with eagerness, is the attempt to counteract
,J the magnetism of the town by the magic of
j/ ownership. The creation of some form of

yeoman or peasant proprietorship, with the
right to all improvements and the whole
produce of labour, appears, by experiment
in England and experience in all Western
Europe, the sole method of preserving an
agricultural people. In France such a
population forms the backbone of the nation,
with a life narrow, laborious, thrifty, in-
credibly austere ; but a life of free men, with
"^^Ar -^ ^^^ \o\^ of the country and its very soil

never found in the * patriotism ' of the cities
^^,. — the random and pitiful patriotism of a
/^ landless people. In Denmark direct pro-
prietorship has preserved a peasant race,
prosperous and secure, strong in a conscious-
ness of national well-being. In Ireland it
has come as a great hope to a nation which,
after a history of unparalleled tragedy,
seemed to be vanishing from its own land.
Peasant ownership is to stay the plague of
the American emigration. The great cities
of England are England's America ; and the
similar plague here demands a similar
remedy. The small experiments hitherto
undertaken by private enterprise in many
diverse parts of the country have demon-
strated the possibilities of a larger success.
There is a real demand for such holdings

THE ENGLISH CITY 67

when obtainable, strong promises of
economic success ; and all the developments
of technical education, agricultural experi-
ment, revived village industry, and co-opera-
tion have been proved congruous and accept-
able when once hope has been awakened and
freedom secured. It is a hard, exacting
life — experiment will demonstrate many a
failure — but, where successful, it will create
a race fundamentally different from the
shiftless, hopeless, dulled peasant, who is
the forlorn product of the system now
crumbling away.

Small tenancies, or peasant proprietorships
alone, are indeed no permanent solution of
the problem of agriculture. Where such a
system is resisting that co-operation and
communal direction, which alone is adequate
to modem conditions, it is everywhere sink-
ing into abyss. But the first condition of the
new agriculture, which is replacing the old
wasteful system, is free access to the land
and security of tenure. Once this estab-
lished desire for betterment, and the forces
of change make directly for union, and in
that union for a future development of com-
munal activity whose end no man can foresee.
The point of any programme, however, is to
emphasize the preliminary work of multiply-
ing the number of independent workers on
the land, the times showing that the day-

5—2

68 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

labourer is so determined to depart that,
whatever else may be possible, at least the
old system camiot long survive.

Undoubtedly Parliament, if seriously in
earnest in the matter, could do much to
place this class of independent cultivators
on the soil. A universal land-tax might
both assist in the breaking-up of the large
estates, and also provide funds for the pur-
chase and equipment of land suitable for
small holdings. The Small Holdings Act
gave the County Councils certain imperfect
powers of action in this direction. But
the provisions contained no compulsory
clauses. The farmers and landlords who
jmake up those bodies were not inclined to
: forward a policy calculated further to
I diminish a labour supply they already found
inadequate. The Act has remained prac-
tically unused. Either compulsory clauses
must be introduced, or, better, the work of
repatriation must be entrusted to a definite
Commission working under the Board of
Agriculture, in close co-operation with
District and Parish Councils. With funds
placed at its disposal, the work would pro-
ceed on the main lines of methods already
familiar in Ireland — the purchase of estates,
the division into suitable holdings, the pro-
vision of buildings and funds for the first
operations of the occupants, and the selling

THE ENGLISH CITY 69

of the holdings outright, or with a certain
permanent public charge, by a system of
terminable annuities, paid as rent for a
number of years. It is true, indeed, that
neither the unemployed in the cities nor the
normal country labourer would be able
directly to benefit by such a change. But
undoubtedly by some such policy it would
be possible to fix upon the soil a ' yeoman '
class of free men, rearing children under
healthful conditions, able to supply the cities
and colonies with their perpetual demand /
for energetic life. The hope of the creation, !
through these means, of a virile country ■
stock, born of the earth and the open fields,
is a future hope of the countryside of
England, far different from that decay and
sullen waiting for the end which now broods
over all the pleasant landscape, and fills the I
observer with a sense of desolation and j
despair.*

* The above desultory statement, as all those
succeeding, is advanced, I need hardly explain, as
suggestion rather than argument. Those interested
may be recommended a fuller study in the Eeport
of the recent Royal Commission on Agriculture, ad-
mirably summarized by Mr. F. A. Channing, and in
Mr. Rider Haggard's most fascinating investigation
in * Rural England.' Mr. Martin's 'Ruin of Rural
England ' is a rugged and apocalyptic indictment of
present indifference. Detailed accounts of experi-
ments in small holdings at Bewdley and Far Forest

70 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

Of all the ills from which the city race is
suffering, the imperfect supply of houses for
the increasing population, and the over-
crowding which is its consequence, are, per-
haps, the most menacing. For the pressure
on the home, the specific diiseases, and the
more general and far-reaching roughness
and squalor, are striking at the root of ail
that is humane and gentle in family life.
The torrent of humanity has been swept
into sudden whirlpools ; the great towns
have developed in confusion ; they are
spreading daily, not as organized wholes,
but as mere meaningless congestions, with-
out unity or plan. There are actually too
few decent houses for the inhabitants ;
monopoly and competition drive up rents,
and give a fictitious value to insanitary and
undesirable dwellings. Within, the family
is cramped and confined, packed, in unhealth-
ful proximity, in layers of humanity in blocks
and tenements ; outside stretch the visible
horrors of expanding London, with pro-
vision of open spaces entirely dependent on
the spasmodic energy of the philanthropist
or the whim of the millionaire. It would
be impossible to overestimate the general

and elsewhere, and of the regeneration of Denmark,
have been published by the English Land Coloniza-
tion Society and the Christian Social Union.

THE ENGLISH CITY 73

lowering effects on body, mind, and spirit
of residence pent up in those labyrinths of
mean streets which form the abodes of the
coming race.

In a gray desolation of a relentless mean-
ness, in cities around which annually other
cities are plastered as if effectively to bar
egress in the heavy windless air, with sight
of occasional changing sky alone represent-
ing the world of out of doors, the children
of England, numbered by the hundred
thousand, are growing to maturity. To
these must presently come the demand of
large horizons and the things of the spirit ;
in the future, the huge burden of Empire,
with control of ancient and immemorial
civilizations scattered over a variegated
world.

No man should ever be surprised at the
follies of man ; little but calamity and
earthquake can ever penetrate minds
deadened in custom and routine. But a
visitor from some region beyond the fixed
stars might be moved to amazement in con-
templation of these ruins of human aspira-
tion, when he learnt that rarely, if ever, did
their condition come before the discussion
of the Legislature ; that few protested their
danger, and these only to deaf ears ; that,
in general, those with power to move the
public mind and influence change appeared

72 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

entirely satisfied with the life developing in
those strange subterranean worlds, the
wildernesses of the great cities of England.
Immediate remedies could indeed be
suggested, were the gravity of the situation
once apprehended and immediate remedies
desired. The drastic treatment of owners
of * slum ' property ; the clearance of the
home from the ' house tax,' which, in the
form of the local rate, practically vetoes any
general improvement ; the encouragement
of building by the municipality, especially
for the poorest, to increase the actual avail-
able houses ; the hastening of the develop-
ment of all transit facilities; the stimulating
of the development of outlying suburbs
through judicious taxation of unoccupied
land, accompanied by the granting of large
powers to the municipality to control de-
velopment, similar to those possessed by
many of the cities of Germany — these all
put in force simultaneously, and regardless
of the plaints of vested interests, would
effect substantial change. The first needs
no explanation : the evil is glaring. After
the attainment of a certain stage of decay,
under the present law the owner of any
slum area finds it actually remunerative to
encourage the process, in order that, by the
very rankness of its squalor, he may compel
the municipality to purchase his property,

THE ENGLISH CITY 73

and clear it altogether from the earth. The
second demands the shifting of the standard
of assessment from the building to the site
value — a change which would increase the
rate at the centre and diminish it at the
outskirts of the city, thus directly forward-
ing that scattering process which is a neces-
sity for restoration to healthful conditions.
The third is hampered by the suspicion and
grudging concessions of the Central
Authority. Better transit, again, is con-
tinually being checked, especially in
London, by a Parliamentary majority,
ignorant alike of the needs and desires of
the people. Steamboats on the river,
municipal omnibuses, the linking of
northern and southern tramways, are
dismissed amid contemptuous laughter.
The rating of vacant land at its selling
value would immediately hasten suburban
development, and help to break that ring
which is cramping the city peoples into a
tightening congestion. While the substitu-
tion of order for chaos in the development
of the town would preserve the coming
generations from increase of the burden
which the past has laid upon the present ;
would insure breathing-spaces, open parks
all round the city, great avenues of com-
munication and pure air from the fields
beyond ; fostering the development of a

74 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

city not entirely grievous in the sight of
the years to come, when Fulham, or
Lewisham, or Canning Town will stand as
a warning and perpetual judgment of a
civilization ' that thus could build.*

Following the outward provision of the
home comes consideration of the developing
life within — of all that is meant by the
* education ' of the child who is heir to all
the progress of the past. Here the im-
mediate necessities of change are, for the
most part, beyond the boundaries of legisla-
tion. Mr. H. G. Wells, in ' Mankind in the
Making,' that most stimulating and sugges-
tive of all recent essays in social reconstruc-
tion, has assailed, with humour and some
violence, the methods of present training ;
by which the growing child of all classes is
infected with our shabby compromises, and
driven from liberal and gentle ways into
imitation of the average man and woman of
the day. Here I would but emphasize the
folly of a system of ' national ' education
which, after expending unparalleled sums
iupon an elementary training for its children,
acquiesces with apparent cheerfulness in the
entire destruction of its handiwork as those
children grow to maturity. The child
passes from school at fourteen or earlier to
long hours of toil ; and, month by month,

THE ENGLISH CITY 75

the laborious lessons of schooldays are rent
off like a garment.

Before the freedom of the factory and the
devastating influences of the street the
knowledge, manners, discipline, religious
and moral ideals crumple up and disappear.
The 'clean and beautiful children/ with'
such possibilities of refined and considerate
life, in a few years, and as by a turn of the
kaleidoscope, become transformed into the
vacant, ineffectual crowds of the abyss.

The immediate methods of escape from
this elemental tragedy are not easily demon-
strated. The demand for child labour, the
higher standard of comfort which its pay-
ment brings to the home, the readiness of
the children themselves to enter life, and the
air of amused contempt with which any
education other than purely technical and
remunerative is regarded by the people of
this country, render impotent those few who
call for reform. The children are generally
eager to be liberated from the restraints of
school, and proud of the money they con-
tribute to the household. Though the hours
are appallingly long, in London often from
eight to eight, with a long journey to and
from work, the work itself is not generally
felt as onerous. But the work, often me-
chanical, and entirely indifferent to the
future needs of the child, is prohibitive of

76 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

all outside culture and development ; at the
age of adolescence it presses terribly upon
the growing bodies, especially of the girls,
who are to be the mothers of the coming
generations. Without any doubt at all this
premature toil is responsible, perhaps more
than any other cause, for that general tired-
ness and lassitude so characteristic of the
city populations — a lassitude only the
more manifest through its reactions in the
craving for strong excitements and occa-
sional waves of a feverish and unnatural
energy.

The accepted verdict condemns the
parents of the children for acquiescence in
apprenticeship to such slavery. Much of
the adolescent labour, more of the child
labour, which is still more deplorable — the
filling up of the interstices of school hours
with drudgery for a meagre pittance —
might, indeed, seem preventable. But those
familiar with the life of the poor in the
cities will be inclined to resent this general
accusation. Mr. Bernard Shaw, so entirely
right upon all humane and vital issues, has
denounced this cant with a refreshing
plainness. ' It is difficult,' he says, * for
the readers of, say, the Spectator and the
Times to form any conception of the mag-
nitude of a promotion from eighteen shillings
a week to twenty-four or from twenty-four

THE ENGLISH CITY 77

to thirty. . . . The truth is, that if ^ve
shillings a week made as much difference
to a duke as it does to many labourers, he
would send his son out into the streets
to earn it at ten years old, if the law
allowed him.'

Some complete prohibition of the employ-
ment of children of school age, and sharp
limitation of the hours of employment for
the immediately succeeding years, combined
with a gradual levelling up of the age of
full attendance and the extension of the
system of compulsion to the evening schools,
seem the only possible remedies. At present
the evening schools languish, largely owing
to the long hours of toil. I have myself
persuaded many children to start attendance
at the evening classes of the London Board ;
but in almost every case, the classes, after
a time, have been abandoned. The long
hours, the confined atmosphere, the re-
pressed energies, demand something dif-
ferent, in the few minutes of leisure, from
intellectual effort. The same experience
is testified by the clubs for boys and girls,
which have been so prominent a feature
of modern philanthropy ; classes almost
invariably prove a failure, and are replaced
by bagatelle and billiards, gymnastics and
dancing. The limitation of child labour
under sixteen to an eight or even a six

78 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS^ CLUB

hours' day would prove no material hard-
ship ; though resented by the employers,
especially those who are replacing men's
work with the cheaper labour of women
and children, it would be supported by the
trade unions and leaders of the working
classes — it would be pregnant with bene-
ficial results in the future. What man or
woman over thirty — so rings Mr. Wells'
challenge — dare hope for ' the deliverance
of all our blood and speech from those
fouler things than chattel slavery, child
and adolescent labour ' ? All intimate with
the life of the poor will welcome his call
to the youth of the country to inscribe
such a deliverance upon the foremost of
the banners of their crusade.

Beyond the home and the children come
the questions of labour and the work of
man. In the subject of unemployment in
its wider aspects we touch the heart of
social discontent. Casual or poorly-paid
labour for the worst, insecurity for the
best, a rapidly diminishing labour value as
age approaches — these are the particular
features of the industrial world which have
developed under the new mechanical system.
A famine in Nepal, an earthquake in Peru,
the activities of a Chicago speculator, may
suddenly sweep out of regular employment

THE ENGLISH CITY 79

masses' of English labourers, some at least
to be driven down into irrevocable ruin.
The workman, seeking work, and seeking it
in vain, is one of the permanent and tragic
figures of the twentieth-century city. * The
hell of unemployment,' with all its laceration
and moral destruction ; the days spent in
tramping the streets seeking work ; the
fierce or fawning competition for mean
positions amid crowds of similar unfor-
tunates ; the disappearance of savings, then
of the home ; the tightening grasp of want ;
the cruelties of a gusty benevolence ; the
final eviction, and economic collapse and
disappearance of the family fallen and
trampled under — is it wonderful that any
plausible statesman who promises relief
from this nightmare should be listened to
with an eager attention ? or that a certain
impatience should be exhibited with those
who, as an alternative, can but preach
patience and an 'unparalleled commercial
prosperity ' ? The present methods of miti-
gating the effects of these obscure changes
in the labour market are altogether crude
and clumsy. * Charity ' is liberal, but
random and ill - regulated, probably pro-
ductive of far more harm than good. Any-
one who has followed the operations of a
* Relief Committee ' will be able to testify
to the revelations of the degradation of

80 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

character under the influence of privation
and a great fear ; the proud and indepen-
dent applicants of the commencement deli-
quescing into the hungry, greedy, voluble
crowd of the close. And the present Poor
Law, with its workless * workhouses/ its
sting of insult, its haphazard and ill-
directed activities of outdoor relief — a
system founded in haste in a community
mainly rural, and to save the nation from
imminent danger — is a manifestation of
communal activity of which those citizens
who contribute to its wasteful expenditure
have little reason to be proud.

The tragedy of unemployment deepens
in the case of those men who are visibly
aging, passing prematurely into that con-
dition when society has neither use nor
regard for their services. The development
of the modern city life, in its feverish thirst
for gain, sucks up the activities of the
young ; work can always be found for the
children. But the man of forty has already
become suspect ; at fifty there is evidently
stretching before him the bleak old age of
the unwanted poor. The despairing clutch
of the aging at any degrading occupation,
which before they would have scorned, is
one of the commonest and pitifulest sights
of modern life. I think of those whom I
have known — those who dye their hair to

THE ENGLISH CITY 81

keep the appearance of youth ; the applicants
for positions, their efforts towards respecta-
bility, the ink-lined coat, the shabbiness
concealed — the attempt, always so grotesque
and ineffective, to strike the right note be-
tween a dignity that will command respect
and an eagerness that will become a mere
mendicant pleading for aid. I remember
one, with a record of over thirty years*
consistent service, exhibiting hands twisted
and gnarled with disease, who shuffles daily
through his work with the help of kindly
comrades, fearing each day to be detected ;
though the work itself is an agony, the one
panic fear is, not that he shall be compelled,
but that he shall be forbidden to continue.
I think of others tucked away out of sight
in the recesses of tenement dwellings, flung
aside from the active machinery of the
world, who ' cannot quite bring themselves *
to join the Unemployed processions or solicit
a promiscuous charity of the crowd ; who
cling to the desperate hope that one day
the cloud will lighten, the miracle happen
that someone will be found desiring their
services. This is in no austere and frugal
community, with difficulty supporting its
children, but amid wealth pouring into its
borders beyond the dreams of avarice, and
such luxury and vain display as can only
be paralleled in the later days of Rome.

6

82 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS^ CLUB

The customary cant, of inevitable failure
or an act of Providence, should not for a
moment be tolerated in face of such abun-
dance of resource and wasteful prodigality
as is making England the envy and the
wonder of the nations of the world.

The unemployed, the unemployable, the
old — these are the problems which imme-
diately will confront that Minister of Labour
whose appointment should be one of the first
acts of the coming Liberal Government. For,
dealing with the first two, I have seen no
more satisfactory suggestions than those
put forth by Canon Barnett (who, if any-
one, has a right to speak), and incorporated
in the Report upon unemployment pre-
sented to the London County Council by
the Committee of the Conference called last
year to consider the subject.* With the
experience already gained abroad, and from
y j-experiment at home — by the double system
*/ of labour colonies for those who desire
work in temporary unemployment, accept-
able by free men, candying none of the
degradations of charity and State relief,
and of penal colonies for those who do not
desire work, as humane as may be, but
deliberately designed for the elimination of

* See all through that Report, published in the
spring of 1903 (King and Co.), for a wise and sober
treatment of the whole subject.

THE ENGLISH CITY 83

the * loafer ' and the ' cadger ' — it might be
possible greatly to diminish, if not entirely
to remove, the injury and wretchedness
erected by the present chaos.

And for the old we can but press, in and
out of season, for the forwarding of that
national system of universal old age pensions ^^jk
wdth which Mr. Charles Booth's name will
always be honourably associated. A definite
establishment of the principle w^ould itself
be almost sufficient, with the construction
of the machinery for its administration. If
the age-limit of sixty or sixty-five proves
at present impracticable, let it be initiated
at seventy-five or seventy. For we would
be prepared indeed to welcome any advance,
however small, towards a civilization, though
always protesting ourselves dissatisfied until
that civilization be attained.

Beyond the specific case of unemploy-
ment there is the larger problem of the
growth of a whole class of men, women,
and children living ' in poverty,' into which
every spell of unemployment flings fresh
victims. It is a forlorn, parasitic class,
supporting a low-grade life largely at the
expense of those who still live, self-reliant,
in the daylight. Disorganized, unskilled
labour, the casually employed, widows
working with their children in their homes,

6—2

84 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

the partially maimed, the ineiFective, the
tired, together form a kind of monstrous
fungus, spreading round the roots~of the
moaerir city civilization — a class which the
community has neither the humanity to
kill outright, nor the alertness and courage
to raise to some intelligible conditions of
being. A vigorous and, at times, passionate
controversy has been waged by two com-
petent social investigators whether, as a
matter of fact, the family income of any
considerable proportion of these forlorn and
forgotten poor is sunk below some fanciful
' line of poverty,' representing a minimum
of mere physical sufficiency. To the social
reformer the question will appear entirely
academic. He knows the main facts beyond
hope of challenge. He is conscious always
of an existence around him in which life
has become degraded far below the level
of savage and primitive man. He sees a
whole community dwelling in a dim twilight
land, cut off from sunshine and the world
which has a meaning, scourged by specific

{ diseases and vices, bound up in a circle of
privation — anaemic and sickly children,
premature toil, premature child-bearing,
years of humiliation, dishonourable age.

, He recognises the injury inflicted by this
class, especially on those just above it —
the decent workers who largely bear the

THE ENGLISH CITY 85

burden of its continuance. * The poverty
of the poor,' Mr. Charles Booth asserts, * is
mainly the result of the competition of the
very poor.' He apprehends something
which casts a kind of black smudge over
the boasted progress of the nineteenth
century, and causes all its complacent songs
of triumph suddenly to appear a little
vulgar, a little shrill.

The problem of the residuum — of the
drainipg of the abyss — must sooner or later
be faced by the community as a whole,
acting through its appointed rulers. It
must be assailed from many sides, and by
experiment which will often prove a failure
and excite the ready scorn of the wise.
Something (though, as Mr. Rowntree has
shown, not much) will be done by the
decent support of old age ; more by rational
education of the children; still more by
the cuttmg away of the sources of supply
in the treatment of unemployment and the
loafer. Better houses, fresh air, the spread-
ing of the town mto something approaching
the garden cities of our dreams, will help
to break up the congestions which at present
are creating impenetrable lumps of poverty.
England is splitting into cities of labour \^.
and cities of pleasure ; the poor are collected
into stqgjaant pools amid the labour com-
munities : and the householders here find

\

86 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS^ CLUB

the burden laid upon their homes in the
form of an ever increasing poor-rate becom-
ing almost intolerable. In London, at
least, that method has become a glaring
scandal, by which the rich municipalities
' dump ' their poor upon lands beyond the
river, or into the obscure regions to the
eastward of the city, and cheerfully repudiate
all subsequent responsibility. Equalization
of rates carries with it an elemental principle
of justice. Beyond this, there should be
resolute attempts to eliminate * sweating,' and
a regulation and restriction of home indus-
tries, frankly undeterred by the spectre of
the 'poor widow. ^ And, in the develop-
ment of the State and Municipality, em-
ploying directly an always increasing
number of workers, always at standard
hours and a living wage, there rests a great
hope of escape from the squalid chaos of
the present into something which English-
men will be able to contemplate with a
juster pride. A legislature which would
recognise the reality and permanence of
this remarkable development of communal
activity, would wisely encourage, advise,
control, check at times, but always with
insight and sympathy — instead of (as now)
thrusting in entirely spasmodic and clumsy
oppositions at the dictate of any affected
private enterprise or vested interest, with

THE ENGLISH CITY 87

a gusty, irrational policy, veering from day
to day, now sanctioning, now vetoing, with
no conception of future possibilities, or
vision of a large and attainable end — would
be a legislature which would forward a
humane and rational policy in the present,
and earn an honourable remembrance in the
days to come.

The reforms here barely indicated necessi-
tate an increased revenue and expenditure.
With the National Budget already swollen
to dangerous dimensions, party; politicians
might hesitate before committing themselves
to such a further develo2:)ment. I believe
that much indeed could be done by adjust-
ment and rearrangement, by wise economies,
by a policy of peace and vigorous control
of those * Empire builders ' who thrust
forward wars and expeditions m the re-
moter regions of the world. But, beyond
the sources of expenditure at present avail-
able, some of us are looking with hopeful
eyes at further sources of revenue, and a
broadening of the basis of taxation in a
direction far removed from an impost upon
the food of the poor. We can see a revenue
obtainable from a judicious system of land 4-
taxation — a payment justly demanded by ^
a State which has taken over from the land-
owner all the responsibilities formerly asso-

\y

88 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

ciated with territorial * ownership.' We
would demand, with this, the extension of
the system of graduation already accepted
in the income tax ; so that irresponsible
and unsettled wealth should contribute far
more than at present to the general well-
being of the community — a system by which
not only would revenue be obtained, but a
real menace to the future removed. And
many of us regard with friendliness the
suggestion for the increase of the direct
taxation of unearned incomes and of the
dividends on capital invested abroad, such
as the scheme recently put forward by
Mr. Pethick Lawrence as an alternative to
Mr. Chamberlain's wild and hazardous
schemes for preferential treatment of
Colonies and Empire.

With some such modest programme as
this now outlined, any party seriously con-
cerned with the welfare and future of the
common people of England might start
upon that work of social reconstruction
which has been too long delayed. It is a
programme in no respects revolutionary,
involving no large organic changes, assert-
ing no novel legislative principles. It would
not, if carried out in its entirety, inaugurate
the Golden Age nor abolish ills as old as
time. But it would mark a step forward,

THE ENGLISH CITY 89

and along winning lines ; it would eliminate
great masses of human wretchedness, and
bring incalculable benefits to those patient,
silent populations amongst whom hope of
amelioration has almost died away. It
could be carried to completion by any party
which would recall the meanmg of patriotism,
too long forgotten, and recognise that the
future of the English race is being decided,
not on the boundaries of the world, but
here at the heart of the Empire.

The first impression of the life of those
submerged cities which are the particular
products of the world's latest changes is that
of a large disorder. The visitor sees exist-
ence, as it seems, drifting without purpose or
plan — man dying, man bemg born ; a confu-
sion of human habitations ; a confusion of
human lives. Restless, dissatisfied faces
haunt him along all the city ways ; he
apprehends something gone astray, the lost
key of progress — a people which has missed
the object of its being. Children are play-
ing in all the streets ; there are casual places
of worship, casual places of pleasure ; the
atmosphere is of unsettlement and vague
disturbance; as if humanity, fleeing from
some threatened destruction, had encamped
in any huddled fashion for a night and a
day. He sees no evident system, or mutual

90 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS^ CLUB

dependence, or effort towards an organic
whole ; here are a thousand worlds each
pursumg its separate functions ; amid the
multitude crowded in lane and alley, each
walks solitary. Later, this first impression
fades, to be replaced by another. Just
! below the surface everywhere appear order,
i machinery, regulation. The children are
' drilled and instructed under close law ; the
policeman is at every corner, the reljellious,
as quietly as may be, conveyed into servi-
tude; the infirm, the broken, the old, are
shut up behind high walls, away from the
pleasant life of man. Begging is sternly
suppressed, squalor sedulously hidden; no
sights of naked poverty are tolerated, such
as those which scandalize the tourist in the
sunshine of a southern town. The roads
are swept and cleaned, the sewage system
unimpeachable, the public lavatories un-
paralleled in Europe. Behind the decent
citizen, as he treads his narrow appointed
path, brood large impersonal forces, waiting
to pounce upon the errant, and drive him
back to the accustomed ways. At the
end comes the public cemetery, with free,
efiicient burial for the unimportant dead.
Contemplatmg this spectacle of a large
activity, the observer is moved to a further
inquiry. To what end ? The meaning of
it all ? The design of the elaborate

THE ENGLISH CITY 91

machinery, and the results attained, are
questions which open far-reaching issues.
What relation, he will ask, have these lava-
tories and these cemeteries, all the busy
exercise of government, its institutions, its
inspectors, its smooth and polished mechan-
isms, with anything which, from the ex-
perience of all the past, he can recognise as
a civilization ? He sees common humanity
condemned to monotonous toil and mirthless
pleasure ; with no intelligible advance in
gentleness and the art of living ; rarely rising
to a vivid and passionate apprehension of
the greatness of its life in the present, or of
its immeasurable future desthiy. * Things
are in the saddle and ride mankind.' ' For
that myriad humanity which throngs the
cities of England,' is the verdict of a critic
of an alien race, * I feel a profound pity ;
for it seems to me that in factory, in mine,
in warehouse, the life they have chosen to
live in the past, the lives those born into
that country must almost inevitably lead
now, is further off from beauty, more remote
from spirit, more alien from deity, than that
led by any people hitherto in the memory
of the world.'

With the problem thus apprehended,
desire is deepened for the wider distribution
of the constituents of human well-bemg,
for the transformation of present society

92 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

iiito something more just, more intelligible,
more humane.

The belief has indeed vanished, that
political or social change, effected by legis-
lature or council, has power of itself to create
the world of our desire, and bring that better
day for which all are longing. Life for the
mass of mankind will never be a victorious
business. At the best it is afternoon, with
a touch of evening in it and the coming
night ; well if under an unclouded sky, with
light on the horizon, and a promise of sleep
f untroubled by bad dreams. Material change
I can but prepare for things greater than itself:
^ removing obstacles, constructing channels for
those liberating and spiritual forces which
alone can transfigure the lot of man.

But here, surely, and more, perhaps,
now than in all past days, the work of a
deliberate social reconstruction is offering
great opportunites to the energies of reform.
I can understand impatience and bitter feel-
ing amongst those who see time passing and
nothing accomplished ; and the forces of
evil increasing continually; and another
generation and yet another growing into
distorted, unlovely life, whose life might
have been a thing so different. I cannot
understand those who, confronted with the
branding and defacement of the bodies and
the souls of men which are the handiwork

^f

THE ENGLISH CITY 93

of the modern city, profess themselves satis-
fied with routme and trivial action, heedless
alike of challenge and appeal. So much
can be done, so much demands doing ; in
the days of the life of a man, as all the past
witnesses, a world may perish, a world be
bom.

The writer through whose work London
first became articulate has described how
the noise of the street-organ gathered up
for him all the confusion of the city wilder-
ness. * The life of men who toil without
hope, yet with the hunger of an unsatisfied
desire ; of women in whom the sweetness of
their sex is perishing under labour and
misery ; the laugh, the song of the girl who
strives to enjoy her year or two of youthful
vigour, knowing the darkness of the years
to come ; the careless defiance of the youth
who feels his blood, and revolts against the
lot which would tame it — all that is purely
human in these darkened multitudes,' said
George Gissing, ' speaks to you as you
listen.' In that * vulgar clanging ' he found
an undreamt-of pathos, and * the secret of
hidden London half revealed.'

' How sour sweet music is
When time is broke, and no proportion kept !
So is it in the music of men's lives.'

Our cities, as all others, are * built to
music' No exultant melody rises to-day

94 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

from their labyrinthine warrens. * This
music mads me/ one might exclaim with the
tormented king ; * in me, it seems, it will
make wise men mad.'

There are those who, amid the discord of
failure and baffled purpose, hear echoes of
other harmonies; hearing, are content to
work for the promise of the future — a hope
beyond the desire of dreams.

THE ENGLISH COUNTRYSIDE

By B. C. K. Ensor

CLEAR your minds for the moment of
the Lake district, of the moorlands
between the Cheviots and the Peak, of the
mountain limestone, of the New Forest,
Exmoor, and Dartmoor, and of Cornwall.
The wonderful variety of England is not
to be forgotten ; but a country's character,
like a man's, is tested by its rules, and not
by its exceptions. Start, therefore, with
the common landscapes of the average hum-
drum English counties. They will appear
less average, with fewer common elements,
the further you proceed, resembling in this
their inhabitants, the country labourers,
whose rich variety of minds and souls only
ignorance can simplify into ' Hodge.* * The
more originality one has/ says Pascal, ' the
more original men one discovers,' and, we
wall add, * the more original landscapes.'
Still, take England as a whole, and illus-
trate it by four such different counties as
Shropshire, Buckinghamshire, Devon, and
95

96 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

Kent, and there will appear a common
something not to be found on the banks
of Rhine or Seine. A community in his-
" toric human conditions, political, social,
economic, has wrought this community in
landscape ; and certainly the effect is good,
whatever be thought of its causes.

Returning from the modern cities of
Europe, from Paris or Frankfort, one finds
Manchester and Birmingham detestable,
and even London discouraging. Each of
the great countries with a past can show
towns which dwarf the beauties and the
romance of Oxford. But with the country-
side it is all the other way ; from the typical
German or typical French landscape we can
revert to the typical English one with a
solid satisfaction in the superiority of our
heritage. Partial such satisfaction may be,
like family pride or a workman's approval
of his own work, yet we feel no misgiving
about challenging the outsider to refute it.

The comparison of family or handiwork
is not irrelevant, because all landscape
suited to man's normal moods (the many
kinds of wilderness are but medicine for
the abnormal) is of man's making. It is
like a piece of music for which Nature
furnishes the instrument, good or bad, and
man chooses the tune and the key. And
this human authorship has the interest of

THE ENGLISH COUNTRYSIDE 97

being plural and impersonal, the revelation
of a multiple soul, as is that^of folk-song or
of medieval architecture. Now, the key of
English landscape is stability — the stability
of immemorial peace, peaceful industry,
industrious loyalty to the cause of human
comfort. The villages and fields bear wit-
ness to an uninterrupted rural civilization
without parallel in Western Europe^ South
of the Trent you are in a land where for
more than four centuries — ever since Bos-
worth Field — practically no battles have
been fought save in a single war, and that
a singularly humane war.* All that time
men have been able to live in the open
country without having to carry arms or
fortify their homes. The gentry built
manor-houses instead of castles ; the farms,
the barns, the cottages, the churches, even
the hedges, were the handiwork of men
who could look for comfort, and had not to
look for fire and sword. When civilization
reawoke in Europe, many countries antici-
pated and outstripped England ; and in
North Italy, in Flanders and Brabant, and
in West Germany, there was a culture
altogether above the English. But even

* The wonderful moderation shown in the war
between King and Parliament may be better appraised
if we remember that the Thirty Years' War was
contemporary with it.

7

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while it flourished, it flourished chiefly
behind city walls and in sound of warfare ;
and since it flourished, North Italy, the
Low Countries, and West Germany have
for centuries been Europe's battlefields.
The nearest approach, on a comparable
scale, to the long rural orderliness of
England is that of France. But, in the first
place, it is very much more recent — it dates
at the earliest from Henry IV.; in the
second, it was established on a less satisfac-
tory political and social basis, whence the
Revolution and rupture of continuity ; in
the third, its best period, the nineteenth
century, was handicapped by the recurrence
of exhausting wars and invasions. Up to
the time of the industrial revolution, and in
\the mass till the end of the Napoleonic
wars, the English were peculiar in Europe
as a people whose culture was rural.
Excepting London and Bristol, there had
come to be no great cities, only market
towns for flourishing country districts.
Cities in the Continental sense, with fortified
walls and the tight patriotism of more or
less independent communities, passed com-
pletely out of the English ken. We lost
something thereby, as the Continental cities
plainly show us. But the net loss was less
than the apparent. It is not really against
London and Oxford that we should weigh

THE ENGLISH COUNTRYSIDE 99

Florence and Paris and Nlirnberg. ' The
human wealth of a populous countryside in
which all classes lived, and could live, at
peace, for centuries — that is our arch-
achievement as a nation, the source and con-
dition of our other greatnesses, the base on
whose fragments, ' majestic though in ruin,*
we can still found, if not our loudest, at
least our most legitimate fame^

Perhaps the best description of this is
still the one in Milton's 'L' Allegro.' That
was written about 270 years ago, yet the
spirit of it, if not all the detail, may be found
in our country now. Thousands of our
villages are the same villages which were
old villages in Milton's day ; to the build-
ings and the ordering of the landscape each
age adds a few new features, and leaves
many old ones. It is difficult to convey
this without citing particular villages, diffi-
cult to cite any one without giving the
impression that it is unique— which it only
will be in the sense that all are. From no
egotism, but to guarantee the random
character of his selection, the writer will
select his own birthplace. It is a large
village in Somerset, including in several
hamlets between 300 and 400 dwellings.
Of these, four-fifths at least are of a beauti-
ful stone — a yellow oolite which age mellows
into the softest gray-brown ; a majority

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100 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

(dwindling fast, alas ! under pressure of
rates for fire insurance) have roofs of thatch,
pleasant to the eye and, for the cottager,
both warm in winter and cool in summer.
The village church has more than one
beautiful survival of Norman building ; the
landlord's house is the work of Wren.
Several farmhouses have some architectural
character; of many homes, the outer walls
must be ancient, of very many more the
foundations ; they are literally rooted in the
centuries. This permanence is not confined
to stones and mortar. No doubt there are
changes : an old main-road has been diverted,
and its course become a lane; a railway
has dissected a long combe and threaded
the cross-roads where suicides were buried ;
a squire who loved the place and loved
beauty has done judicious tree-planting, and
degenerate successors have let it be undone.
But the neighbourhood shows many elms
that have reached the utmost span of elm
life, and oaks that for antiquity might have
fed Gurth's swine ; you will find the garden
even of an unimportant house fenced with
a massive box-hedge of immemorial growth.
The hedges, indeed, all over South England
are among the most symptomatic things.
Often they are very old ; always the manner
of them is. Caesar describes it minutely as
an interesting* custom, localized in his time
^ 'Bell. Gall.,' ii. 17.

THE ENGLISH COUNTJaYSIDE: i^OJ-

by the opposite shore of the Channel ; on
that side it has survived but imperfectly ;
in England its survival and extension across
the country almost coincide with the course
of rural civilization. In the South the
hedge attains its richest development ; hazel,
maple, ash, oak, privet, and dogwood freely
supplement the hawthorn and blackthorn ;
bramble and wild-rose, honeysuckle and
bryony, lace and tangle their growth ; and
there is that glorious wild clematis which
gets fluffy in winter, and earns the good
names of Travellers' Joy and Old Man's
Beard. As you work up through the
Midlands the hedges, though still large and
ubiquitous, get simpler ; they have not the
same slowly-acquired wealth of composition ;
hawthorn predominates, often to monotony.
In the North the hedges are but timid and
rare colonists ; fields which would bear
fine ones are bounded by bleak walls, whose
fashion has overlapped its legitimate hill
area ; what hedges there are tend to have a
planted and restrained appearance, and do
not run lavishly to flowers. The plainness
of Lancashire fields is of a piece with the
ugliness of Lancashire homes ; on farm as
well as in factory the people are working
with success on a high plane of industrial
efficiency, but they have never had a breath-
ing space to study and develop true comfort.

10^ PAPERS Ot THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

Let us not, while doing justice to the
human (that is, the English) element in our
country, forget what Nature herself has
done for us. Our best poetry from Chaucer
to Milton is full of apt doxologies on this
theme, and if (in spite of Wordsworth and
the ' Scholar- Gipsy ' and 'Thyrsis') our
nineteenth- century poets showed less feeling
for home landscapes, the balance is possibly
redressed by the painters, especially by
Constable. A good deal of nonsense under-
lies the conventional disparagements of our
climate. The charge of fogginess is largely
an echo of foreign verdicts passed by visitors
to our great towns, whose fogs are quite
abnormal, and result from their unique
smoke nuisance. The remedy is not to
abuse Nature, but to use stoves in our
houses and compel our manufacturers to
burn their own smoke.

Again, the charge of changeableness is
quite true if we judge our weather from day
to day, but judged, as plants and animals
judge it, from month to month and from
year to year, it is one of the least varying
in the world. The central facts of it are
that we lie near the sea and the Gulf Stream,
which temper for us both heat or cold ; that
we get very regular and sufficient rain with-
out being soaked in it as the smaller islands
off the Atlantic are ; that we have no very

THE ENGLISH COUNTRYSIDE 103

high mountains or very great areas of bog
and lake, but that a certain moderation in
the lie of the land co-operates with the
moderation of the climate. The one violent
feature of it all is the wind, but then our
winds are sea- winds; we never get the
exhausted, withering breath of a continent,
parched or frozen, but on its way hither it
crosses water, is purified, is cooled or
warmed, and takes up some of the sea's
ozone. Lastly, we have exceptional sea-
scapes and cloudscapes. Our seaside has
been more ' spoilt by the railways ' than our
country generally. Yet of good scenery on
the sea or in range of it, there is an immense
deal left, and whatever be the percentage of
Englishmen who have never seen the sea, it
must be small relatively to that of most
nations. Our clouds are the sea's legacy,
and with them we may associate, not ' fogs,'
but an undoubted prevalence of beautiful
mist effects and niceties of atmosphere.
England is, j^erhaps, less favoured herein
than Ireland, but more than most of the
Continent ; and it is especially through
English painters that the world has learned
to understand clouds.

A word should be added on the geological
side. Review momentarily the contrasts
of scenery afforded by the millstone - grit
and the mountain limestone in the Pennine ;

104 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

the volcanic rocks of tha Lake District,
Dartmoor, and Cornwall;! the chalk downs
of South England, with their clear colours,
absence of decoration, and Hellenic reliance
on perfectly beautiful contoursj' the red
sandstones, old and new, with their decora-
tively broken landscapes, rich woodlands,
and orchards ; the lias and the oolite, with
the stone buildings whose dignity so well
matches the ample vegetation ; the sands
and gravels of the South, with their pines
and ling, their oaks and bracken, and their
flowers ; lastly, the netherlands of East
Anglia. Time forbids our dwelling upon
details such as the knife of syenite which
cleaves the west Midlands and forms the
Malvern Hills, or the river-work of Thames
and Tees, Severn and Tamar. The treasure
of these is inexhaustible to him who will
seek it.

Nevertheless, when all is said, w^e are
human, and our feeling for landscape is
a feeling for the place of humanity in it.
That place is in England not ideal ; we
have no Arcadias. Life on our land has
always been hard ; at times it has been
almost crushing. Yet through centuries of
its history breathes that strange assuaging
influence of which our hedges and village
\ churches are the best emblems and gauges.
This remarkable peace and stability, this

THE ENGLISH COUNTRYSIDE 105

air of inveterate comfort, belong primarily
to England south of the Trent. North of
the Trent civilization is altogether younger.
The wilder features of the landscape are
among England's glories, but the ' English-
ness,' and most of the merit, of its human
aspects is a late echo of Southern influence.
The Northern people were not soaked with
civilization like the Southerners, but ab-
ruptly rushed into it from a relatively law-
less stage. The accident that the bulk of
English coal lay north,* and the further
accident that the Lancashire climate was
the best for textile manufacture, brought it
about that a region till then neglected and
barbarous was called on to pioneer the
industrial revolution. The unblunted
energy and raw power of Northern
Englishmen stood them in surprisingly
good stead at this crisis ; they so rose to
their task that they lead the world in it
still, ^et it is possible, had the lot fallen
upon a people with more previous civiliza-
tion, not only that the extreme hideousness
of the English manufacturing towns might
have been less extreme, but that modern

* It is curious that even the most southern of the
great coal-fields lay in counties, Staflford and Derby,
which in the eighteenth century seem to have
been noted as backward. This somewhat discounts
Birmingham and the Black Country.

106 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

industrialism as a whole might have taken
more account of sweetness and light. ,

II

Now, in connection with this common,
beautiful English country, two considera-
tions have at the present an importance
which is insufficiently recognised. In the
first place, it is less appreciated by English-
men, and plays a smaller part in their lives
than ever before ; in the second place, social
and economic changes are modifying it in
directions which it is desirable that we
should forecast and, if possible, influence.

In estimating the divorce between English
life and English landscape, the transfer of
the masses of our population from country
to city is, of course, our most obvious
thought — so obvious that it need not be
laboured. Features of it, however, which
deserve passing emphasis are its scale and
its recentness.

Mr. Riis, in a recent book on the slum
question in New York, notes as an ominous
thing that o?ze-third of the population of the
. United States is now urban. In England
'^j^ the proportion is two-ihivd^. And the

significance of this urban life has quite
recently altered ; to live in a great town
has not long meant to live out of practical

THE ENGLISH COUNTRYSIDE 107

walking range of the country. What is
now modern London was, when Turner
sketched it, a region in which trees and
green fields played a remarkably large part.
Districts like Camberwell were leafy and
half rural a generation ago. The six great
cities now decorated with Lord Mayors are
still newer. A Liverpool man of fifty can
remember viewing the sea across open fields
which are now Bootle. A Manchester work-
man of forty years back had nearly as much
liberty as the patriarch Isaac ' to meditate in
the field at the eventide.' In the host of
towns with between 100,000 and 300,000
inhabitants the process takes place under
our eyes. A young man can remember
artisans working plots of land near the
centre of Oldham, which smoke and build-
ing have since caused to disappear. How
utterly deruralized is the life of the town
workers one illustration may indicate. In
June, 1902, the writer piloted four crippled
workmen from a working-class district of
Manchester about some grounds on the edge
of the suburbs, and put to them a practical
flower catechism. Three of them, be it
noted, had, before the events which left them
cripples, enjoyed high wages and relative
prosperity. None of them knew or could
name forget-me-nots, daisies, dandelions j
clover, pansies, or lilies - of- the - valley.

108 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

Three of them were baffled by a poppy ;
the fourth felt confident that it was ' a rose.'
Now, whether men can live (and their souls
live) for an indefinite number of generations
thus divorced from Nature is an interesting
speculation ; but we should notice that we
have no experience in the matter, for out-
side a very limited area of London the
condition is scarcely anywhere three genera-
tions old.

For these people's reacquaintance with
V' the country nothing will avail but large
economic changes tending to break up the
big cities. We will allude to such later,
but turn for the present to the case of the
upper and upper middle classes, whose
collective will is still that of the nation for
most purposes. With them, too, the ques-
tion of dwelling-place is very important ;
the surest way to incorporate the country
in one's life is to live there ; a majority of
our upper classes used recently to do so,
and a minority do so now. With them,
however, other questions arise, for they can
travel. And the point worth examining
at some length is the difference between
modern methods of travelling considered as
methods of becoming acquainted with the
country.

People are fond of opining that ' the
trains have spoilt the country.' If this

THE ENGLISH COUNTRYSIDE 109

means that the trains have multiplied intru-
ders upon it, it is inaccurate. The trains
have overpopulated a few picturesque spots,
but their function with regard to most of
the country is not to carry people to it,
but to cjirry people past it without looking
at it. ' They largely originated the ' pictur-
esque spot ' theory of landscape — the theory
that to see England or any other country,
it suffices to see a few remarkable but
isolated fragments — ' views ' — and to skip
the intervening landscape, which alone gives
the fragments their real meaning, and
enables them to be appreciated as parts of
a whole. ' This theory would be closely
paralleled if you tried to read ^ Paradise
Lost ' by perusing the lines extracted from
it in Bartlett's 'Familiar Quotations/ and
skipping the rest of the poem. Trains have
so fed the absurdity that while commonly
thought to have increased travelling they
have, in fact, nearly abolished it. The
average Englishman of to-day makes far
more journeys than the average English-
man of a century ago, but we should
hesitate to say that he travels more. A
journey to-day means getting into a closed
box at one point and getting out of it at
another ; the interval is mere transport.
The fewer journeys of the pre-train epoch
had much more intrinsic significance.

110 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

Whether you coached or rode, you em-
barked on an enterprise whose pith and
moment were not merely at the end of it
and outside of it ; you moved slowly
enough to notice as you passed them the
lives of men and things ; you moved in
the open air and in easy hail of them all —
up the main streets of all intervening towns
and villages, over the crests of the inter-
vening hills, passing the woods, the fields,
the farms, the cattle, the crops, and the wild
creatures — not with the fulness of obser-
vation possible to a walker, but with
immeasurably more than is possible to a
train passenger. The man who went
from Oxford or Bristol to London went
through a considerable human experience.
Of course, business is business, and we
shall not for business purposes go back on
the new locomotion. We could not afford
as a community that each of us should
always travel at leisure, any more than that
each of us should live always in a spacious
park. But the case of travelling for holi-
day remains, and there is no absurdity in
asking whether persons who rush from
London to Brighton for a week's holiday
might not spend their week better in travel-
ling by easy road-stages across Sussex and
back again.

When this question is raised, the bicyclist

THE ENGLISH COUNTRYSIDE 111

enters and explains that he is just the man
we want. His machine, we hear, has
restored the glory of road travelling, and
done more than anything else to make
known to Englishmen the English land-
scape. Sorrowfully but firmly we once
more demur. Cycling may be considered
under two heads, according as it is a sub-
stitute for train travelling or a substitute
for walking. To the former may be given
a moderate approval. There is not really
very much of it done, because the amount
of baggage which a cycle will carry is too
limited. Moreover, though cycling is a
more fruitful mode of locomotion than the
train, it is less fruitful than almost every
other mode. The speed is too high for the
rider to observe much unless he can sur-
render all his faculties to observation ; this
is precisely what the cycle rider, unlike the
carriage rider, cannot do. Nor caji the
cyclist rival herein the man on horseback.
Even the expert cyclist must attend far
more to his machine than an expert horse-
man to his horse, and, unlike the horse-
man, he is tied to the ' good roads,' which
for purposes of observation are usually the
worst. But the chief thing which cycling
has supplanted is walking, and there it has
done harm scarcely mitigated. It has given
the last fillip to the fatal ' view ' conception

112 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

of landscape. The townMweller has not
even gained by it economically ; it is
cheaper for him to reach the country by
ti;g.in and see it on foot. The notion that,
at least for men, it is a superior exercise
seems more than doubtful. The nervous
craving @f modern pe(5ple for soulless and
thoughtless exhilaration sufficiently ex-
plains ijts deplorable vogue, which will last
until the stronger natures set a saner
example.

Possibly all locomotive inventions will
not be as disappointing for our purpose as
the bicycle and the train. There is a great
future for motor-cars whenever manufac-
turers give up pitting them against railway-
engines — a rivalry at once hopeless and
dangerous — and design them simply to
achieve highroad speeds more cheaply, more
conveniently, and with less wear than
horse-drawn vehicles. But though travelling
may thus be greatly improved, especially in
the direction of cheapness, it is not on the
side of conveyance that its greatest needs
lie. Everyone can walk at no cost beyond
boot-leather, and though everyone cannot
drive or ride, the large class that can goes
little upon driving or riding tours. The
real obstacle, as everyone who has toured
at all knows, is the badness of English
inns. The tradition of 'mine host' is

THE ENGLISH COUNTRYSIDE 113

nearly dead ; bad accommodation, grudg-
ingly and in civilly offered and exorbi-
tantly charged for, is the rule ' in* our^
towns and villages. English ho*tels . dj^-^
courage all except commercial travellers,
for whose peculiar and not very refined
tastes a certain class of accommo(Sltion has
to be provided — though even this less
well than formerly. Convinced that inn
hospitality properly kept up over the
country must be remunerative, the traveller
cannot at first conceive why the innkeepers
should so flout a good source of revenue.
The explanation lies probably in the tied-
house system. When the country's hotels
pass under the control of brewery com-
panies, they acquire a supreme authority
which has no interest in their bed and board
departments, but only in their bars. To
this, and not to any inherent depravity in
English hosts, must be ascribed the lament-
able result. It is an effect of ' the trade's '
influence not sufficiently remarked, and
whoever procured its removal would pro-
bably have done more for our countryside
than all the bicycle inventors put together.

Ill

If the human element in landscape be
thus appreciated, no apology is needed for

8

114 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

discussing here the social conditions of our
countryside. Evidently the stability on
which we have laid stress is not at present
its leading feature. Rapid and remorseless
changes have characterized the last forty
years, and the face of the land will more
and more reflect them.

So far the change has mainly been
decadence. Agriculture has shrunk, and
the people have hurried off the land to
the towns. Of course, if this process con-
tinued indefinitely, the country would cease
to be English, and become a wilderness.
^ Latterly, however, a ' back to the land '
movement has grown up, in which, besides
much smoke, there does seem to be a little
fire. Inside it we may distinguish two
tendencies — one towards multiplying in the
country the number of actual cultivators,
the other towards spreading more widely
over it the people engaged in urban in-
dustry or trade. For convenience we will
christen the one movement ^ agrarianism,'
the other ' suburbanism,' and consider them
separately in order.

' Agrarianism ' is a long story. Histo-
rian, politician, economist, and agricultural
expert all claim their say, and so do an
army of faddists. The present writer is
inclined to think most of the historian and
the agricultural expert. From them, any-

THE ENGLISH COUNTRYSIDE 115

how, we get our first data, and they lead us
to somewhat similar general conclusions.

Historically, we find from the time of the
Black Death and the decay of feudalism
more or less the same trinity of classes as
now — landlords, farmers, and labourers.
The position of the last has chiefly varied
according as they were mere employes, or
also to some extent self-employed upon
holdings of their own. TSluch of the halo
cast round the ' yeoman ' is imaginative,
but it does seem historically the case that
the labourer's prosperity has been associated
with his possession of some rights to land^
It also seems the case that his prosperity
has regularly stimulated that of agriculture
at large, and so that of the farmers, and
this, of course, in turn that of the land-
lords, but that each of these classes has
been by way of killing the goose that laid
the golden eggs. The prosperity of farmers
has been regularly used by them for ends
which have weakened the labourer — the
enclosures under the Tudors and the en-
closures in the period represented by Arthur
Young. Similarly, the landlords have taken
advantage of prosperity to raise the standard
of rent and of their own living above what
the land could economically support. The
immediate eff'ect of the farmers' action was
to reduce the labourers to a dependent

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116 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

state, in which the farmers could and
did thoroughly fleece them. But its ulti-
mate effect was that many labourers left
the land in despair, and the remainder
lacked the skill of men who worked partly
for themselves. Hence both the quantity
and quality of agricultural labour fell off,
and the last state of the farmers was worse
than the first. Meanwhile the landlords
over their heads had so raised rents in the
prosperous times that the farmers had not
netted enough to have much sinking-fund,
while the style of living which the land-
lords had grown into made it difficult for
rents to come down.

Remembering that rural changes are re-
latively slow, and not exactly simultaneous
in different localities, and that even * imme-
diate * effects may linger over several gene-
rations, we can thus trace in the last five
centuries two waves of agricultural pros-
perity rising slowly to a climax and then
sinking from the causes indicated. The
turning-points in the two may be dated
roughly, perhaps, at the dissolution of
the monasteries and the outbreak of the
Napoleonic wars, though all dates must
be inaccurate for such slow and fluid pro-
cesses. ^The moral is that the prosperity
of agriculture has depended on that of the
agricultural labourer, and this in turn on

THE ENGLISH COUNTRYSIDE 117

the labourer's independent possession of
rights to land/^' And at this point history
is strongly endorsed by the present-day
expert in agriculture, who is attaching
more and more importance to the promotion
of small holdings.

Other things which the agricultural expert
is apt to tell us are that our farmers enjoy
a good soil and climate as well as juxta-
position to our town consumers, and that
the application of sufficient capital and
skill to an English farm will always make
it pay, granted a fair chance from the
landlord and the railway company. This
doctrine is so contrary to the chatter of
journalists, as well as to the actual failure
of our farms, that it surprises us, until we
remember the value of the food we buy, not
from far steppes and prairies, but from
Denmark and Holland, and even the
suburbs of Paris, or learn that Belgium
supports per acre over 25 per cent, more
people than Britain has per acre.

Turning to the politico-economic aspect,
and avoiding the hard formulae of land
nationalization or peasant ownership, settled
property or free trade in land, we shall find

* The importance of the fact that these were
largely communal rights may be overrated. Com-
munalism had the advantage of keeping land from '
the control of incapables, but disadvantageously
limited the powers of capables.

118 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

that the public interest in the land's full
exploitation bases two broad requirements :
r (1) That land should, as far as possible, be
only in the hands of people willing and
competent to make the fullest use of it ;
(2) that it should be sufficiently in their
hands to induce them to make such use.
This puts us in a sort of dilemma, for the
first requirement militates against peasant
proprietary or other occupying ownership,*
unless English * ownership ' be much cur-
tailed, and, in particular, some Act super-
seding the Settled Land Acts make it
impossible to tie up estates ; while the
second seems to militate against all mere
rent-paying tenancy. The way out of this
dilemma may be by State-landlordism, the
State skimming the economic rent, but
leaving the tenant as free as possible ; or
it may be by rendering land readily sale-
able among a class of small proprietors,
each with unlimited powers of user, but
little power of disposal except sale.f The

* Because ownership may pass to and reside in
women, children, or hmatics, as well as fully capable
persons, while occupancy ex hypothesi is to be reserved
for the latter. All the English machinery of legal
settlements is designed, of course, actually to kee;p
ownership in incapable hands.

f In this case economic rent would disappear, as
constant sale made the units of occupancy values with
different areas, and not areas with different values.

THE ENGLISH COUNTRYSIDE 119

latter solution is what we are nearest, and
it does not differ from the former so much
as appears at first sight. In either case, the
possessors of the land would be a class with
a maximum control over its present use,
and a minimum control over its future
destiny. This would make them desper-
ately industrious and industrial — which we
should by no means regret — but it would
also make them blind to the interests of
the future.

Serit arbores quce alteri sceculo prosint
can scarcely be the motto of such culti-
vators, and a quite new need arises for the
State promotion of the permanent good of
our landscape. The old English adherence
to primogeniture and strict settlements of
landed estate has had as its solitary ad-
vantage the committal of landscapes to the
control of families whose point of view was
not that of a single generation. The size
of their estates also enabled them to con-
ceive landscape gardening on broad lines.
The curtailment of estates in duration and
in scale which a small holdings system will
imply makes public activity and State action
in the interest of our landscape imperative.
* Back to the land ' may be the siiie qua non .
of a revived English landscape, but it will ■ *^
not develop that revival automatically.

When we turn from ' agrarianism * to

120 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS^ CLUB

* suburbanism,' the need is still more
apparent. And suburbanism seems more
sure to come. The prospect of a large
part of our country being parcelled up
between parkdom and villadom makes
progress daily. Some expect from it a
healthy revivifying of country life, remind -
in^j us how in the eighteenth century the
villages were invigorated when the rich
merchant class took to land-owning. But
the actual effects of villadom and parkdom
are now old enough and considerable
enough to be estimated. The eighteenth-
century park was a home and a centre of
local government. The modern million-
aire's park supplies at most a dormitory
and a resort for selfish pleasures — commonly
only the latter. The villa is like unto it.
True, it monopolizes, at least individually,
a less area, and exists less purely for
pleasure. On the other hand, its occu-
pants' hearts and businesses are as little
in the country as the millionaire's, and
they have less money to pay for the
services of better-trained people. ' Sub-
urbanism ' does not mean taking to a
country life ; it means sleeping in the
country and living your active life in
town ; hence the villa's incurable way of
looking spiritually irrelevant to a landscape
where it is optically prominent. Moreover,

THE ENGLISH COUNTRYSIDE 121

while the town culture spread by sub-
urbanism is in the bulk a poor thing, it
has a fatal prestige before which more
excellent country things wither. Perhaps
the best symbol of this is the disappearance
of our last folk-songs before the rubbish of
the London music-halls. Few sadder or
more thought-begetting experiences can be
undergone than to sit in an inn in a remote
village and hear rustics troll tin-kettle
ditties about Seven Dials or the Old Kent
Road.

' Suburbanism,' then, cannot, any more
than ' agrarianism,' be left to develop as it
pleases without some attempt to watch and
modify its development in the national
interest. And if this attempt is necessitated
by the coming of the new orders, it is
necessitated no less by the passing of the
old. Economically, the mass of English
landowners are a mere incubus ; their
universal employment of land-agents has
left them without further business in the
country. Nevertheless, thanks to settle-
ment and entail, they pass but slowly.
Their hearts are in the town, where their
culture centres ; the country serves them to
shoot and hunt. Their rents have fallen ;
their standard of life, forced up by urban
example, has not ; the exhaustion of their
estates pays the difference. The most

122 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

typical squire's family, perhaps, is that
which goes annually to London for the
season, and there spends so much money
that for the rest of the yenr it is too poor
for any rural purpose. It has no money to
repair or build labourers' cottages, no money
to plant trees or even to replace those which
it recklessly fells for sale. The next stage,
only too common also, is that of the squire
whose debts prevent his living on his estate.
He lets his house and shooting to strangers,
and the countryside is controlled by an
unfortunate land-agent who is allowed to
spend nothing on it, and whose one function
is to squeeze money for an utterly unsympa-
thetic absentee.

Two examples from one neighbourhood
will illustrate the bearings of this. One
of the main roads out of Oxford, lacking in
fine prospects, was formerly beautified by a
remarkable number of roadside elms. In the
year 1896-1897 a preponderant number of
these were felled, and a beautiful main road
became a plain one. The landlord was an
absentee nobleman who wanted money ; the
trees were not replaced, and, if the writer is
correctly informed, have not been. The
other case is that of a field close outside
Oxford at the entrance of Marston. On
one side of it runs the road, on the other
a lane. Both were, till a few years ago,

THE ENGLISH COUNTRYSIDE 123

bordered by colonnades of elms whose
beauty and nearness to Oxford made them
a public treasure. The held was acquired
by a local tradesman who wanted to feed
stock in it, and he had every tree felled on
the ground that they lessened his pasturage.

It is clear that on both these occasions
some public protest should have been made,
if not to prevent felling, at least to insure
replanting ; but it is believed that none
was made. Incidents of these kinds are
occurring constantly all over England ; you
can hardly go into any district without
encountering them. Those here mentioned
are distinguished by no special enormity
from a vast multitude of others. More-
over, common as they are, they will get
much commoner, for the whole current of
events favours them.

Confronted, then, by the havoc of tran-
sition, agrarianism, and suburbanism, what
is the lover of his native land to do ? His
first duty is to get, personally, sound ideas
on rural aesthetics, to determine to be no
Gallio in the matter. His next is to sup-
port and promote all common action,
whether through the State and local
governing bodies, or, in the first place,
through some society. Art generally has
a good deal to hope from common action,
which is in practice less that of the multi-

124 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

tude than that of the minority who care.
For this reason we need not despair of the
country simply because the movements to
deface it are genuine and popular. The
inhabitants of Birmingham, Manchester,
and Liverpool are for the most part grossly
inartistic. But the Art Committees of
their Councils have proved equal to making
very creditable choices for their picture
galleries. The contrast between these
and their homes and streets, the fruit
of individual action, is striking; yet even
the homes and streets would be far worse
had not common action imposed building
by-laws. A useful first step would be an
English Landscape Protection Society,
doing such work as is done already to
some extent in Switzerland, Germany,
Belgium, and France. Such a society
might include in its interest the fate of
particular features of the country,* but in
general it should avoid the mere conservation
of * views.' Such conservation amounts
practically to the creation of parks; you
can justify it in exceptional cases, as in the
neighbourhood of great cities, where one
extreme of artificiality needs to be balanced
by another, but this is a need to which the
public conscience is fairly alive in the

* Thus in 1902 it might have championed Sonning
Bridges.

THE ENGLISH COUNTRYSIDE 125

localities concerned. What a national
society should do is rather to promote
regulations affecting landscape at large, and
the fact that local bodies will usually have
to apply these should not prevent their
having a quite general character. Land-
scape is essentially a matter of whole dis-
tricts and countries, and not of small pre-
servable bits ; the one fault of the Societe
pour la Protection des Paysages de France
is an imperfect appreciation of this. Again,
it is essentially a correlative of living, work-
ing humanity ; we do not want to get our
artistic thrills from one set of places, and
our loaves and cheeses from another ;
beauty, work, and wealth must flourish side
by side on the same patch. Here are four
suggestions with which we might make
a beginning :

1. Protection of trees.

2. Protection of fauna and flora.

3. Restriction of the abuses of adver-

tising.

4. Public plantation of wastes.

Of these, the first is seriously considered
in France and Belgium, where the idea is
to compel everyone who cuts down a road-
side tree to grow another in its stead.
There would be no difficulty about apply-,
ing this to the trees in our roadside hedges,
and scarcely anything else will save them.

126 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

Conceivably we might apply it to roadside
hedges themselves, or to trees standing on
any boundary-line between two fields.

The second is already contemplated in
England. Birds are the most crying in-
stance, and we have the Wild Birds
Protection Acts. These, however, are very
faulty, and avail little as against the land-
owner or his agents, who are precisely the
most dangerous class. At present our
wealth of birds (and corresponding lack of
noxious insects — mosquitoes, horse-flies,
etc.) is one of the greatest advantages which
our landscapes possess over those of the
Continent. The development of a peasantry
in England would soon bring us down to
the Continental level herein, unless we fore-
armed ourselves. We may note that our
large landowners are far from guiltless ;
they have exterminated many exceptionally
fine species as ' vermin,* and are persecu-
ting relentlessly many more. The case of
our few mammals also deserves attention,
and both suburbanism and agrarianism will
bring that of flora to the front.

The abuses of advertising are being fought,
chiefly, in Switzerland and Germany, though
neither country sufl^ers as badly as England.
In Prussia, a law has been passed whose
moderate but not ineff^ective provisions
have more than once been noticed in the

THE ENGLISH COUxNTRYSIDE 127

London press. In Switzerland, the Council
of the Canton of Vaud recently had the
problem examined by a commission. Its
report analyzed with great care the various
practical alternatives : to tax posters by
their area in a rapidly ascending scale ; to
prohibit on open ground any posters which
do not advertise the sale, etc., of the ground
itself; to forbid the display of posters within
a certain range (if possible, prohibitive) of
roads and railways ; or, lastly, to make all
display of posters subject to the license of
a local authority, with power to forbid them
wherever it sees fit. Obviously, these alter-
natives do not all exclude or include each
other, and a heavy tax might well be com-
bined with certain prohibitive measures.
Advertising is an entirely unproductive
industry, and no public impoverishment
would result from its beino; discourao^ed.

The plantation suggested might include
national afforestation schemes and a certain
amount of landscape gardening by local
authorities. A departmental committee of
the Board of Agriculture reported in 1902
on afforestation, and it seems likely that
some may eventually be done ; the obstacle
at present is the want of a trained staff.
Some plantation by local authorities might
develop naturally from any tree-protection
law which they might have to enforce.

128 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

The law would throw upon landowners the
burden of replacing the fallen or felled
trees with fresh ones ; but while some land-
owners might do their own replanting,
many might find it more convenient to pay
the local authority to do so. In this way
local authorities would come to employ
staffs of men for tree-planting, and these
they might go on to use for judicious
landscape gardening of the sensible and
economical sort practised by the squire-
archy in its better days.

These four channels in which public
action might be taken are not suggested as
a systematic or exhaustive list, but simply
as a list of specimens. All four concern
urgent matters, all four can only be dealt
with after Parliamentary legislation, and such
legislation will only be secured by a society
or societies ad hoc. And as every such
society is made up of individuals, and the
driving-power of quite a few may do much
if the few exert it straight in the right
direction, it is a real duty for every patrio-
tic Englishman to take trouble and form
sound opinions on this subject. Effective
zeal must be based on clear thought ;
indeed, the lazy or conventional aesthete
may hinder more than the sheer Philistine.
Especially we should beware of that atti-
tude common to many who vaguely feel

THE ENGLISH COUNTRYSIDE 129

that ^ the country is being spoiled ' — an
attitude of blind opposition to agrarianism
and suburbanism and of reaction towards
obsolete ideals. It is difficult for an
Englishman to-day to read the ' Georgics '
without a melancholy consciousness of the
parallelism between Virgil's Italy and his
own England. All Virgil's feeling for the
divini gloria imris^ the passion for a land-
scape compounded of gracious Nature and
a noble past, may mingle in him with much
of Virgil's poignant regret :

* At secura quies et nescia fallere vita
Dives opum variarum, at latis otia fundis,
Speluncse, vivique lacus, at frigida Tempe,
Mugitusque bourn, mollesque sub arbore somni
Non absunt ; illic saltus et lustra ferarum,
Et patiens operum exiguoque adsueta inventus,
Sacra deura sanctique patres ; extrema per illos
Justitia excedens terris vestigia fecit.'

How admirable it all is, and how truth-
ful, until we hit the rooted conservatism
of those last two lines ! How like those
two lines are to the plaints with which men
like Wordsworth and Southey, who could
value the old parochial village, saluted the
industrial revolution ! Yet in those two
lines we learn the secret why the Virgilian
policy failed even though the Emperor of
the world took it up.

THE CASE OF IRELAND

By Hugh Law, M.P.

^ rpiHE spirit of nationality is at once the
i bond and the safeguard of kingdoms ;
it is something above laws and beyond
thrones, the impalpable element, the inner
life of States. But anti-nationality is the
confusion and downfall of kingdoms ; it is
a blight and a mildew to the heritage of
the people/ If all record of Edmund
Burke's life had been lost, and if nothing
of his remained to us excepting this one
passage, one might, I think, have correctly
inferred from it his Irish birth. Among
the peoples of Western Europe only an
Irishman would have been likely to see so
clearly that nationality is ' something above
laws and beyond thrones, something which
may even at times be hostile to both.' For
in Ireland alone of all countries professedly
governed through free institutions the
spirit of nationality was then, and still is,
regarded with disfavour and distrust by the
rulers of the State and by those who arro-
gate to themselves the title of Loyalists.
It must, I think, be very difficult for an
130

THE CASE OF IRELAND ISl

Englishman to realize that there can be any
conflict between patriotism and loyalty —
between the duty which a man owes to his
own people and the duty which, under
normal circumstances, he owes to the State.
The Irish child, on the other hand, is con-
scious from its earliest years of a divided
allegiance. * The national factor/ writes
a Unionist statesman, ' has been studiously
eliminated from education ; and Ireland
is, perhaps, the only country in Europe
where it was part of the settled policy
of those who had the guidance of educa-
tion to ignore the literature, history, arts
and traditions of the people.' "^ In this,
and in a hundred other ways, there has
been engendered in the Irish view of that
Empire, of which his country de facto forms
part, an antagonism between Nationalism
and Imperialism, just as an antagonism
between Religion and Law was created by
the penal code of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries.

Thus, the proposition laid down in the
opening chapter of this book, that the spirit
of Imperialism is the enemy of the spirit of
Patriotism, we in Ireland regard as self-
evident. This which in England seems to be
a paradox in Ireland is seen to be a truism.

* * Ireland and the New Century,' by Sir Horace
Plunkett, p. 152.

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132 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS^ CLUB

Indeed nothing, perhaps, more clearly reveals
the existence of the chasm which divides
Irish from English sentiment than the
attitude of Ireland towards those of her
own sons who have achieved distinction in
the service of the Empire. She whose
ancient annals are filled with the praise of
warriors and heroes, whose children have
played no small part in the building up of
the Empire, and whose people, lacking w^hat
Stevenson called the tree-like self-sufficiency
of the English, desire always the praise of
their fellow-men, can yet take no pleasure
nor feel any pride in the doings of those
Irishmen whom Englishmen and Scotchmen
are eager to honour.

Some years ago Lady Gregory, in a
brilliant and most illuminating essay,*
reminded us that it is not the careers of
Wellington, Wolseley, or Roberts that Ire-
land recalls with pride, but those of Lord
Edward Fitzgerald, of Wolfe Tone, of
Robert Emmet, and (perhaps most signi-
ficant of all) of the ' Manchester Martyrs*
— those three convicted felons in memory
of whom a song has been composed, which,

* 'Felons of Our Land,' Cornhill Magaziney May,
1900. The Irish point of view is also most charmingly
and admirably expressed in Mr. Stephen Gwynn's
poem, ' A Song of Defeat ' (* A Lay of Ossian and
Patrick, and Other Poems.' Hodges, Figgis and
Co.).

THE CASE OF IRELAND 133

notwithstanding its mediocre qualities, may
be said to hold the place of an Irish National
Anthem.

The truth is that in Ireland, as nowhere
else within the British Empire — unless of
late in South Africa — loyalty and patriotism,
those sister principles, have been deliberately
placed at enmity one to the other. And
whilst patriotism has been steadily frowned
upon by those in authority, soi-disant
loyalty has always been so munificently
rewarded that * loyalist * has, among the
people of Ireland, come to be synonymous
with place-hunter.

It has, indeed, required no ordinary mis-
management to achieve such a result
amongst a people naturally prone to rever-
ence outward authority — a people who shed
their blood like water for Charles I. and
James II., kings to whom they had but
little reason to be grateful, and at a time
when most of the other subjects of those
monarchs had abandoned them. That * God
save Ireland' and *God save the King'
should be regarded as contradictory aspira-
tions surely casts a strange light upon the
Government of the country. For my part,
I believe patriotism and loyalty to be no
more irreconcilable in Ireland than they
have been found to be in Canada, Australia,
or New Zealand. The true enemy of the

V

134 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS^ CLUB

Imperial connection, whether in Ireland or
South Africa, is not the United Irish League
or the Afrikander Bond, but the spirit of
Imperialism as we have known it in these
countries during the past thirty years.

The present position of affairs will appear
the more extraordinary when we recollect
that the Irish are essentially a military race,
naturally attracted by the glory of splendid
achievements and great names. I can well
imagine that an Imperialism of the sword
rather than of the Stock Exchange might
under other conditions have taken a strong
hold of the imaginations of Irishmen. Ire-
land owes much to the benevolence of the
Quakers, and she has never persecuted that
sect as Englishmen once did ; but there are
no Quakers of Irish origin. An Imperialism
such as that of revolutionary and Napoleonic
France, instinct with love of country, founded
upon the principles of liberty and equality
and brotherhood, following glory at all per-
sonal risks and sacrifices, and inspired by
devotion to a great leader, might find only
too many adherents among the Irish people.

That which, apart from all accidental and
removable causes of friction, renders the
Imperialism of to-day detestable in the eyes
of Irishmen is that it combines the pe-
dantries of cosmopolitanism with the
brutalities proper to itself. Your modern

THE CASE OF IRELAND 135

Imperialist may, indeed, find it profitable
to trade upon a tradition of patriotism
which at heart he despises. Thus, news-
papers directed by cosmopolitan Hebrew
financiers, in whose eyes the English flag is
a Valuable commercial asset,' waxed very
eloquent in their exhortations to brave
English women to send their sons to fight
for ' King and country ' in South Africa.
A Martian arriving on this planet towards
the close of the year 1899, and chancing
upon a copy of the Daily Telegraph or
Daily Mail, would probably have been led to
believe that the Modder River was some-
where in the South of England, and that
the men of Kent were engaged upon a
desperate but heroic struggle in defence of
their hearths and homes with overwhelming
hordes launched against them by a mighty
potentate named Paul Kruger. Yet in
reality the modern Imperialist, calculating
the material gain to be derived from some
war to be carried on at a safe distance from
his own arm-chair, is unable even to com-
prehend the nature of that glorious emotion
that has over and over again caused men to
sacrifice everything for a national idea, and
mentally places patriotism with religion and
ethics in the category of those things which
are all very well for women (other women,
if the Imperialist be of that sex) and

136 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS^ CLUB

children, but which intelligent and well-
educated persons should have outgrown.

I recollect meeting one afternoon during
the first fortnight of the South African War
a lady who is a leader in this school of
cosmopolitan-Imperialism. The conversa-
tion turned upon the probable duration of
the struggle. In common with most of the
prophets of that time, this lady was very
positive that it would all be over within
three months. The Boers, said she, were
sure to be beaten before long in some
considerable engagement. Then, being
sensible people, they would realize that
the game was not worth the candle, that,
in fact, they were about to obtain a much
better government than their own (the
latest sanitary improvements, men with
brass buttons at every corner, and all
the rest of it), and, refusing to listen
any longer to the insensate pleadings of
their leaders, would settle down nicely
under British rule, and everyone would
live happily ever after. To this I timidly
ventured to reply that possibly the Boer,
like other men one had heard of, might be
attached to his own ways, might prefer to
govern himself badly to being well governed
by someone else — might, in short, be that
absurd creature (I spoke the word hesita-
tingly as one barely decent) a patriot. I

THE CASE OF IRELAND 137

still remember the firm though kindly
manner in which this absurd suggestion was
put by. The Boers, it appeared, were not,
like the Irish, foolish sentimentalists, but
were practical men of a good Teutonic
stock ; and for the rest, patriotism was an
unintelligible superstition. As for the ethics
of conquest, right and wrong had no place
in the domain of international affairs.
Efficiency alone was worthy of respect.

Well, it cost three years' warfare, and I
forget how many millions of money, to
correct that little miscalculation. And so
widespread was the notion that no sane man
could really fight a losing battle for his
country that it became quite fashionable
amongst those persons who praised the
extraordinary patriotism of certain colonies
(which were just then supplying some
excellent volunteers at a rather high rate of
pay) to describe the Boer leaders as brigands,
and to advocate that they should be executed
as such when captured. Nor did people who,
to do them justice, would have denounced
such conduct in Englishmen similarly placed
as utterly base and treacherous, shrink
from praising the enlightened patriotism
of those Boers who, under the strangely-
chosen name of National Scouts, in the.
darkest hours of their nation's agony, took
up arms against their own people.

138 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

Surely it is not very wonderful that such
opinions should be odious to a nation whose
own history has been one, century after
century, of unavailing struggle against
overwhelming odds. The baser sort of
Irishman may sometimes have thanked
Heaven that he had a country to sell; it
certainly never entered into his brain that
he had no country at all, that patriotism
was not merely unprofitable, but a myth.
Neither do the size and material grandeur
of the Empire appeal much to the imagina-
tion of a race which exhibits a striking
example of the tendency, already noticed in
this book, to indicate affection by words
expressive of littleness and of poverty.
The country which Irish men and women
love, and to which their longings continually
turn in exile, is not the * Empire upon which
the sun never sets,' but Roseen Dhu, * the
little black rose,' Sean bhean bhocht, * the
poor little old woman.'

But if present-day Imperialism is not
likely to make many converts among Irish-
men, it does not follow that Ireland must
always remain hostile to, or at best in-
different to, the welfare of the Empire itself.
True it is that her full claim — a claim based
upon the indestructible rights of nation-
hood— is to Independence. That ideal is far
from being dead. It is still the inspiration

THE CASE OF IRELAND 139

of some of the best Irishmen of to-day, but
its realization in our own time appears to
most of us all but impossible. The com-
plete separation of Ireland from Great
Britain could only come about as the result
either of an unforeseen and incalculable re-
versal of the material conditions of the two
countries, or of an equally incalculable and,
perhaps, even more improbable revolution
in the mental attitude of the more pros-
perous and powerful. Irishmen have to
look that fact in the face ; and, doing so,
they have through their Parliamentary re-
presentatives repeatedly notified their assent
to a compromise, of which Union of the
Crowns of the two kingdoms is no less an
essential part than is Separation of the
Legislatures. Home Rule has for more
than thirt} years been the first plank in
the Nationalist platform : the principle,
with all that it involves of sacrifice as well
as of gain, has been ratified again and
again by National conventions : no one
with any influence in the National ranks
has ever suggested repudiation. Home
Rule within the Empire is not all that Ire-
land, as a Nation, has the right to claim ;
but it is part of an inter-national bargain
by which she, at least, is prepared loyally
to abide.

This aspect of the question has no doubt

140 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS^ CLUB

been a good deal obscured by the attitude
which Irish Nationalists have felt bound to
take up in relation to the King's recent
visits to Ireland.

Now, there are, of course, Irishmen who,
being frankly for independence and nothing
short of it, would under any circumstances
logically decline to treat a King of England
otherwise than as a distinguished foreign
visitor. But the position of the vast
majority of the people of Ireland is some-
thing quite different. Their position is
briefly this : so long as national self-
government is withheld from them they
can do nothing which might be taken as
signifying acquiescence in the existing con-
stitution of which the Crown is the head.
* Loyalty,' cried Henry Grattan, * is a noble,
a judicious, a capacious principle, but loyalty
distinct from liberty is corruption.'

When the King (God bless him!) comes
over to open a free Irish Parliament, he will
receive from his Irish subjects a welcome as
fervent and as sincere as he or any monarch
has ever received in any part of his do-
minions, and from that welcome the acclaim
of many of those who are now most opposed
to the presentation of loyal addresses will
certainly not be absent. It is surely right
to desire a better understanding between
two peoples who, under any conditions of

THE CASE OF IRELAND 141

political union or separation, are bound
through geographical position and inter-
change of trade to have continual communi-
cations one with the other. Yet we shall
make little progress in this direction unless
and until each adopts a different point of view
from that which obtains at present. That
there are faults and errors to correct on the
Irish side I am not at all concerned to deny,
but it is natural and proper to lay the
greater share of the blame upon the shoulders
of the * predominant partner/ who, having
the power, refuses to use it in such a way
as to render good relations more probable.
At any rate, since I conceive myself to be
addressing, in the main, an English audi-
ence, I may be permitted to point out how
inconsistent, and consequently how irritating,
is the habitual treatment of Irish demands.
When it is a question of Home Rule or of
a readjustment of financial relations, we are
told that Ireland is an integral part of the
United Kingdom, and cannot be regarded as
a separate entity. When, on the other hand,
money has to be found from the common
exchequer to carry into operation a Land
Act, Irishmen are told : ' See what John
Bull is doing for you ! We hope you are
duly grateful !' Now, the Unionist cannot
have it both ways. If Paddy is really John
Bull himself under another name, it is

142 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

absurd to ask him to experience the emotion
of gratitude because his rulers have changed
some of his own money out of his right-
hand and into his left-hand breeches pocket.
If, on the other hand, Paddy is really a
* separate enticy,' then it is surely not sur-
prising if he desires to keep his money in his
own pockets and spend it in his own way.
It is, I know, assumed that he w^ould be
unable to get along at all without John's
assistance, but that is by no means * as clear
as the old hill of Howth.'

During the last quarter of the eighteenth
century, under the rule of her ow^n Parlia-
ment, an average revenue of less than
£1,500,000, involving taxation of about
9s. per head of her population, sufficed for
all the purposes of the government of
Ireland, and enabled her, in addition, to
maintain a considerable force of armed men
for the service of the Empire. To-day
the revenue raised in Ireland amounts to
over eleven millions and a half per annum,
and the sum of her taxes to £2 4s. 2d.
per head of her vanishing population.* No
wonder some of us regard the union of
Legislature and Exchequers as a rather

* Return relating to Imperial Revenue (Collection
and Expenditure), Great Britain and Ireland, for
year ending the 31st day of March, 1903. (Parlia-
mentary Paper, No. 269, of Session 1904.)

THE CASE OF IRELAND 143

expensive luxury for the poorer partner. It
is true that expenditure everywhere has
enormously increased during the past hun-
dred years. Yet if a State, such as Sweden,
which has six and a half millions of popu-
lation as against our four and a half
which has a large commerce, a merchant
service, diplomatic and consular representa-
tives, an army and a navy, to say nothing
at all of a highly efficient system of educa-
tion, or of other domestic matters beneath
the notice of our Imperialists — if she, I say
(and hers is not the only case that might
be given), finds a Budget of a little more
than five millions sufficient for her needs,
why, in the name of common-sense, should
Ireland, who cannot command the services
of even one gunboat for the protection
of her fisheries, or control the education
of her own children, be called upon to
find nine, and be grateful to Great Britain
on top of it all ? Though I am far from
denying that many Englishmen are full
of the most generous feelings towards my
country, it is still true that John BulFs
attitude towards Ireland resembles more
than anything else that of a rather egotisti-
cal and rather vulgar man towards a poor
relation whom stress of circumstances has
made a member of his household. Her
little fortune is under his control, and so

144 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS^ CLUB

also are her actions one and all. He used
to ill-treat her savagely once, but of late has
grown tired and a little ashamed of that
exercise, and in somewhat contemptuous
but not altogether unkindly way has begun
to desire to ' make it up.' He is conde-
scendingly amused by some of her ways,
magnanimously tolerates her superstitions,
and praises certain of her accomplish-
ments. Any request for an account of
household income and expenditure as be-
tween them he naturally resents as an
imputation against his w^ell-known financial
probity, but he allows her such pocket-
money as he thinks fit, and gives her
an extra tip sometimes when he is in a
good humour. But to suppose that such a
person has any right to her own opinions, or
can possibly desire to order her life in her own
way — the very idea infuriates him past bear-
ing. The ungrateful, rebellious wretch ! after
all he has done for her — the care of her
property, the sound commercial education,
the example of a prudent religion (not per-
mitted to interfere unduly with worldly
success) — that she should actually want to
have a house of her own, live her own life,
and educate her children as she pleases!
Monstrous I

Yet the fact is that Ireland has a per-
sonality which will not be ignored. You

THE CASE OF IRELAND 145

may make of her a friendly or a hostile
nation ; you can never make her an Eng-
lish shire. If the two nations are to be
friends each must respect the other's point
of view. No friendship is really possible
between two people each of whom at once
begins to fume and fret whenever the other
dissents from the only view, say, of religious
education, which, in his own opinion, befits
a sane and honest man.

The difference in outlook as between the
two peoples is fundamental. To enlarge
upon the causes of this difference would
take up too much space. Some of the most
vital — religion, history, and perhaps race
(though the importance of this is, I think,
often exaggerated) — will occur to everyone.
At any rate, be the causes what they
may, it is an fact that England is to the
Irishman a foreign country. It matters
little that he may have been bom of a good
Protestant stock of English or Scottish
origin, that he has been brought up to
regard Nationalists as * agitators' and
' rebels,* that he has been educated both at
an English private and an English public
school, and has passed through an English
University. Nor does it matter that he has
contracted the most intimate ties with
England, that among Englishmen he has
found many and dear friends — nay, he may

10

146 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

have made his home there, and may not even
desire to return to the country of his birth.
Yet, even so, he will not become at heart an
Englishman: he will in moments of self-
revelation find himself out of touch with
English thought ; he will know himself a
stranger and a sojourner.

The class of resident Irish gentry, indeed,
it is apt to fancy itself more English and
Imperialist than the Jingoes of England.
But with the dying out of the land M^ar,
which has, unhappily, tended to place them
in direct antagonism to the popular move-
ment (in which Agrarianism and Nationalism
have necessarily been blended), it may be
reasonably hoped that the descendants of
those who gave leaders to Ireland in the
seventeenth, eighteenth, and in the early
nineteenth centuries will recollect that they
are Irishmen. We need not, indeed, expect
the men who took part in the life and death
struggle of their class during the terrible
years between 1879 and 1883 to change
their political opinions, but already in the
younger generation there is a marked change
of tone towards Irish ideals. As yet the
change has not much, if at all, affected
politics, nor do we know if it will do so.
But the seed of Nationalism is there. That
which is needed to bring it to perfection
seems to be, remarkably enough, contact

THE CASE OF IRELAND 147

with Englishmen. I have known more
than one case in which the scion of a good
Orange Ulster stock has ripened at Oxford
or Cambridge into what is forcibly termed
in Ireland a ' hillsider.' Flourishing Irish
societies have within the last two or three
years been founded at both these Universi-
ties, and the study of the Irish language
(still looked at askance by pious Irish
Unionists as savouring of Popery and
sedition) is being keenly pursued.

A mystical friend of mine declares that
there is indeed a Genius of the Land who,
subtly and unseen, sways the minds and
spirits of all those who dwell within her
borders, and who, if the entire Irish people
were to die out (as indeed seems not im-
probable), would be equal to the task of
turning a new population of Russian Jews
into Irishmen, with all the qualities and de-
fects characteristic of the old race. Be this
as it may, the attraction which Ireland
exercises upon all those who dwell within
her borders has long ago been recognised.
No political or religious divisions can per-
manently hinder her work. Not the
severest laws availed to prevent the Nor-
mans from mingling their blood with the
conquered and adopting the dress and
customs of the land : the grandson of
Edmund Spenser, who so sweetlv urged

10—2

148 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

upon Elizabeth the prompt extermination
of 'those vile caitiffs ' the Papists of Munster,
found himself obliged to choose the second
and milder of the alternatives offered by
Cromwell to people of his religion (he had
become a Catholic), and suffered transplan-
tation to Connaught : the descendants of
Cromwell's own Ironsides who settled in
Tipperary soon became notorious as Ribbon-
men and Land Leaguers: and the greatest
Irish leader of our times came of a pure
English stock. Even the Protestant bour-
geoisie, least pervious to ideas of any class
in Ireland, has felt the gentle influence ;
and I am told on good authority that the
demand for books dealing with distinctively
Irish subjects has enormously increased
during the last two years at the Public
Library of Rathmines, the heart of that
constituency which some years ago threw
over Sir Horace Plunkett, avowedly on
account of his supposed Nationalist lean-
ings.

As for the country gentry, I repeat that
whenever they forget political catch-words
for a moment, they are Irish to a man.
Readers of that most amusing of recent
Irish books, ^ Some Experiences of an Irish
R.M.,' will remember old Mrs. Knox of
Ausolas (a leader of the * clan that cropped
up in every grade of society in the county

THE CASE OF IRELAND 149

— black Protestants all of them, in virtue
of their descent from a godly soldier of
Cromwell '). ' She hates all English people/
one of her neighbours remarks. ^ She was
coming home from London, and when she
was getting her ticket the man asked if she
had said a ticket for York. *' No, thank
God, Cork !" says Mrs. Knox.' I dare say
the hatred was not very venomous ; but the
little tale is significant.

Of the gulf which separates the mass
of the Irish people — Celtic and almost
wholly Catholic — from the people of the
sister island it is not necessary to say
much. I am not now, it will be borne in
mind, speaking of political differences so
much as of the diversities of character and
feeling which lie behind and govern politics.
There have been many books published
within the last few years which profess to
explain the Irish people to the British
reading public. I do not think that among
them there are any half so instructive as
the two novels in which Father Sheehan,
P.P. of Doneraile, has pictured the daily
life and thoughts of an Irish priest and
his people. Englishmen who read that
wholly delightful book, * My New Curate,'
must have felt that they were for the
time being enveloped in a wholly un-
familiar and perhaps not very agreeable

150 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

atmosphere of thought and feeling. Then,
as if to clinch the matter, we have in * Luke
Delmege ' a detailed study of the contrasts
which the two countries present as seen
through the eyes of a young Irish priest
who, after his ordination, is for a time
placed on the ' English Mission.'

At first he finds in England nothing but
an awful, though splendid, materialism, and
an equally terrible individualism.

* Sometimes he would stand for a dizzy
moment at a chemist's window in London
Road, and stare at the swirling, heaving,
tossing tide of humanity that poured
through the narrow aqueduct. Never a
look or a word of recognition amongst all
these atoms, who stared steadily before
them into space, each intent on coming
uppermost by some natural principle of
selection.'

The whole system appeared to him like
' a huge piece of perfect and polished
mechanism — cold, shining, smooth and re-
gular, but with no more of a soul than
a steam-engine.' Later on he discovers
human and amiable traits which he had at
first supposed absent; and long before his re-
turn to Ireland he comes to appreciate and
admire the people among whom he has been
placed. But, I repeat, from first to last his
attitude is that of a traveller in a foreign

THE CASE OF IRELAND 151

country. He sees much to provoke his ad-
miration, much that he desires and after-
wards endeavours to have imitated in his
own land ; but there is always present the
sense of strangeness, and more often than
not of irreconcilable and eternal differences.
It might seem superfluous to dwell upon
these things, were it not that quite intelli-
gent people can still be found to argue that
there is no more need to allow for distinct
national characteristics in Ireland than in
Yorkshire or Sussex. The Irishman, to
these people's minds, is nothing but a lazier,
dirtier, more turbulent and generally dis-
agreeable (if occasionally amusing) variety
of the Briton. To myself, as, I cannot but
believe, to everyone who has lived in both
countries, such a view is quite ludicrously
wrong. Daily intercourse with the people
of the two islands really affords the best
evidence of their profound dissimilarities.
But if some objective proof be required I
should be inclined to look for it, not so
much in the political sphere as in the
growth of the Irish language movement.
This movement, derided by the wise as im-
practical and denounced by the ' loyalist '
as seditious, has been spreading with ex-
traordinary rapidity among all classes of
Irishmen during the last few years. With
little at first sight to recommend it (since,

152 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

as the prudent were not slow to point out,
a study of French, or German, or even of
shorthand, would be far more likely to put
money into a needy young Irishman's
pocket), but just because it made an appeal
to something deep down in the hearts of the
people, it has swept over the country, chang-
ing and dominating thought ; and behind it
have sprung up all manner of new efforts,
temperance societies, industrial leagues, and
village libraries. There has been a true re-
awakening of the Irish intellect. Now, how
many English men or women could you find
in all Yorkshire or Sussex to form a class
for the study of the Gaelic tongue? Yet,
if there is no difference between the inhabi-
tants of the two islands, except the acci-
dental differences of locality and greater
or less wealth or culture, it should be as
easy to find Gaelic scholars in Yorkshire as,
say, in the county of Dublin, where Irish
lias not been a generally spoken tongue these
two hundred years. For a recent writer
tells us that there is as much Celtic blood
in Yorkshire or Sussex as in North
Munster or Leinster.* Nevertheless we
find that Celtic language and literature
have a significance for all Irishmen — even

* * Keltic Research,' by William Byron Nicholson,
M.A., Bodley Librarian in the University of Oxford.
(H. Frowde, 1904.)

THE CASE OF IRELAND 153

those of non-Celtic stock — which they
cannot have for any Englishman, no matter
what the origin of his family.

But it may be said that national differ-
ences, even if admitted, do not necessarily
imply hostility between the two peoples
(a statement in which I heartily concur),
and that, consequently, as it is supposed,
the constitutional relations of the two
countries need no revision (a conclusion
from which I as heartily dissent). At this
point in the argument the example of Scot-
land is sure to be quoted. ' The national
type of the Scot is,' you will say, * at
least as strongly marked as that of the
Irishman. He has, in some respects, a
prouder history and a better claim to
separate government. Yet he contrives to
get along very happily within the constitu-
tion as now settled. Why cannot you do
likewise T The question has already been
answered in advance by Mr. Chesterton,
but perhaps I may be permitted to add a
word or two from the Irish point of view.
In the first place, the persistence of a
national type in Scotland unaffected by the
country's political absorption in Great
Britain is frankly admitted. Widely as
the Scotch and Irish characters differ one.
from the other, each seems to differ far
more widely from the English, if, at least,

154 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

one may judge from E. L. Stevenson's de-
lightful essay, ^ The Foreigner at Home,'
a study of the contrasts of English
and Scottish temperament, almost every
word of which appears to me applicable
to a similar study of English and Irish.
But then, not only was the Union of
the Crowns of England and Scotland
arrived at in a manner actually flattering
to the pride of the latter country, but
her national feeling was again most care-
fully and wisely considered in the Union of
the Legislatures a century later. At the
very moment when the Bishops and most
of the Roman Catholic clergy of Ireland
were being hunted through the mountains
like wolves, when rewards were publicly
offered for their apprehension, when Mass
could in many places only be celebrated by
stealth on the hill-sides,* the Church of the

* Under the provisions of an Act of 1703 some
1,080 Eoman Catholic priests were registered and
permitted to follow their vocation, though under
the severest restrictions. But all bishops and deans,
and all the * regulars,' and all unregistered clergy,
were treated as criminals. They were liable, on
apprehension, to be imprisoned and banished, and, if
they returned, to be hanged, disembowelled, and
quartered. ' Nor,' writes Mr. Lecky, * were these
idle words. The law of 1709 offered a reward of £50
to anyone who secured the conviction of any Catholic
archbishop, bishop, dean, or vicar-general. In their
own dioceses, in the midst of a purely Catholic
country, in the performance of religious duties which

THE CASE OF IRELAND 155

majority of the Scottish people was estab-
lished and loaded with every mark of royal
favour. There were in Scotland no general
confiscations such as in Ireland repeatedly
'shook the foundations of social life ; for the
forfeitures of the '15 and the '45 in no way
affected the social relations of the owners
and occupiers of the soil. There were no
penal laws enacted against seven -eighths
of the nation. Scotland, again, has had no
bureaucracy similar to that of Dublin Castle.
In a word, her government has never at any
time ceased to be national. Scotland has
always been ruled by Scots, and the speeches
of Scottish Members of the House of
Commons are replied to from the Treasury
Bench in accents rich and racy as their
own. I admit at once the inference that
Home Rule is not necessarily, and in all
cases, inconsistent with the maintenance of
a common Parliament. But the circum-
stances of Scotland which rendered this
possible for her have unhappily no counter-
part in the case of Ireland, and for my

were absolutely essential to the maintenance of their
religion, the Catholic bishops were compelled to live in
obscure hovels, and under feigned names, moving con-
tinually from place to place, meeting their flocks under
shadow of the night, not infrequently taking refuge
from their pursuers in caverns or among the moun-
tains. The position of friars and unregistered priests
was very similar ' (Lecky, * History of Ireland in the
18th Century,' vol. i., p. 160).

156 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

own part I am profoundly sceptical of the
possibility of successfully replacing the rule
of 'the Castle/ except by an executive
directly responsible to a national assembly
representative of the Irish people. Those
ties of common origin, a common tradition,
and common feeling which in other coun-
tries bind rulers and people together in
mutual support, have in Ireland been too
thoroughly destroyed.

However, it is not on the details of
politics that I desire to dwell. The
machinery of reform will easily be found
when once there is a just appreciation of
the problem with which the reformer has to
deal. My contention is, briefly, that the
. phrase * Ireland a Nation * expresses not
^ merely an ideal, but an existing fact. Only
the narrowest of pseudo-legal pedantry
denies Ireland's right to the title. You
may say that ancient Ireland never had a
national government covering the entire
island and accepted by all her septs ; and you
may point to Brian Boru's life-work of unifi-
cation, undone by Irish hands within a few
days after his greatest victory and death.
I answer that the exact status of the Ard-
Righ is for my purpose a matter of com-
plete indifference. Or again, you may point
to the strife between the Irish chieftains
which was the occasion of the first coming

THE CASE OF IRELAND 157

of the Normans, and you may remind me
how some four centuries later the chains of
Ireland were riveted at Kinsale by the
Connaught levies of Clanrickarde, and how
the heroism and genius of Owen Roe
O'Neill were rendered useless by the factions
of Kilkenny. I answer that the work
which Irishmen failed to do for themselves
has been done by their rulers. Her people
have been slowly welded together by the
blows of Fortune. Whether or no Ireland
was a nation when Brian Boru died, or
when Strongbow came, she is a nation now.
If the British descent and Unionist opinions
of a section of the people of Ulster be
thought to invalidate my argument, I
answer that neither political unanimity re-
garding the form of the constitution itself
nor racial homogeneity is necessary to
national existence. If the first be supposed
essential, then France was no nation in
those great days when the French revolu-
tionary armies were overrunning Europe
and French emigres were planning the over-
throw of the new Republic. If the second,
then England is not a nation, and never
can be one. Moreover, there is far more
national feeling in Ulster than most people
— perhaps than even Ulster men them-
selves— are aware. Abuse each other as
they may, Irishmen of different religious

158 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

and political opinions have yet bonds
of intimate union which do not exist
between either Irish party and the most
sympathetic of Englishmen or Scotchmen.
The Irish nation is something greater than
any political party. Ireland, in Parnell's
phrase, cannot afford to lose any of her
sons. Irish Nationalism is not a passing
fancy to be killed by kindness ; it is not
a disorder to be cured even by the most
prolonged course of * resolute government.'
It is a spirit whose sway is coextensive
with the Irish people and indestructible
save through their annihilation.

If it be but once realized that Ireland is
not a weaker, poorer, less progressive Eng-
land, but a nation with something to give
to the world which cannot be given save
at her hands, the Irish problem will, so far
as Englishmen are concerned, have ceased
to exist. For Irishmen it will remain to
carry forward the task proposed to the Irish
Parliament by Henry Grattan in 1788 :

* In the arts that polish life, the manu-
factures that adorn it, you will for many
years be inferior to some other parts of
Europe ; but to nurse a growing people, to
mature a struggling though hardy com-
munity, to mould, to multiply, to consoli-
date, to inspire, and to exalt a young
nution — be these your barbarous accom-
plishments !'

THE CASE OF MACEDONIA

By Heney W. Nbvinson

ON returning from the war between
Greece and Turkey in 1897 I remem-
ber trying to describe the feelings of the
English people with regard to what had
been going on in Turkey, Armenia, and
Crete just before the war broke out. For
eighteen months we had been sickened by a
succession of massacres, carried out in
some cases by the direct order of the Sultan,
and in some cases with his connivance, the
agents of murder being always rewarded for
their services. Though there were probably
not ten people in the Empire who enjoyed
their dinner less on that account, there was
an uneasy feeling that something ought to
be done. Lord Salisbury had publicly
warned the Sultan that he must set his
house in order, and in that warning he
fairly represented the national conscience.

It was dimly remembered that, less than
twenty years before, England had solemnly
undertaken the defence of the Sultan's
Asiatic possessions for all future time in
consideration of the gift of Cyprus and a
159

160 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

promise to introduce all necessary reforms
in Armenia. So when Lord Rosebery
came forward and stated that he had always
believed the Cyprus Convention of 1878
was a dead letter from its very signature,"^
and that in any case the obligations of a
treaty could not be expected to last for
twenty years, it was felt that a good deal of
diplomatic training and historic parallelism
was needed before such an excuse for inaction
could be made to appear decent.

To many people, indeed, there seemed to
be more reason as well as more honour in
Mr. Gladstone's view of our national obliga-
tion when, in one of his last public utter-
ances, the aged leader wrote :

* England may give for herself the most solemn
pledges in the most binding shape, but she now
claims the right of referring it to some other person
or persons. State or States not consulted or concerned
in her act, to determine whether she shall endeavour
to the utmost of her ability to fulfil them. If this
doctrine is really to be adopted, I would respectfully
propose that the old word "honour" should be
effaced from our dictionaries and dropped from our
language. 't

In their hearts most people regarded this
as the fair and natural view, and it was, in
any case, a little difficult to explain away

* Speech at Edinburgh, October 9, 1896.
t Nineteenth Century j October, 1896.

THE CASE OF MACEDONIA 161

the Cyprus Convention as long as we con-
tinued to enjoy the possession of Cyprus.
But, unhappily for the cause of those who
believed in national responsibility, there
was a general opinion in the countrj^ that,
whether something was done or not, the
days of the Turkish Empire were numbered.
The Sultan appeared to have been smitten
by that insanity which is known to precede
destruction by Heaven, and it was therefore
illogically argued that Heaven wished to
destroy him. People who hesitated even to
stake a penny in the defence of his helpless
victims sought their justification in the text :
' Vengeance is Mine : I will repay, saith the
Lord,' and in leaving further action to a
higher power they chose a course which
seemed to them at once secure, reverential,
and cheap. Turkey had been so long
reported rotten as well as cruel that circum-
spect persons imagined she would fall to
pieces of herself, and it seemed almost im-
pious to make a stir when, without mortal
aid, the inevitable and Heaven-directed dis-
memberment of a nefarious Empire was
being so satisfactorily accomplished as the
punishment for crime.

But in this instance Providence has not
acted up to pious expectation. Divine
penalty, left to go its own pace, has been
disappointingly slow. Nearly eight years

11

162 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS^ CLUB

have passed, and we are again confronted
by a situation almost exactly similar. Again
we have been harrowed by a prolonged
story of outrage and massacre, culminating,
so far, in the general devastation of the
Christian villages of Macedonia in August
and September, 1903, and the deliberate
attempt to exterminate their Bulgarian in-
habitants by hunger, cold, and butchery.
Again we have had an uneasy feeling that
something ought to be done. Again we
have been reminded that England was in an
especial manner responsible for these tor-
mented and slaughtered people. It was not
only that after the Crimean War, which we
waged in defence of the Turkish Empire,
we extracted the most solemn pledges of
reform and good government from the
Sultan as some return for our services in
keeping him in Europe. The guarantees
provided by the Hatti-Humayoun and the
Hatti-Sherif of 1856 were, no doubt,
generally forgotten, though they still possess
a certain ironic interest, like the * love and
cherish ^ of a wife-murderer.*

■* Here are a few interesting passages, first from
the Treaty of Paris, Article IX. (1856) :

'His Imperial Majesty the Sultan, having, in his
constant solicitude for the welfare of his subjects,
issued a firman which, while ameliorating their con-
dition, without distinction of religion or of race.

THE CASE OF MACEDONIA 163

Those who watched the Near East knew
well enough that not a single point of the
Sultan's vows in 1856 had ever been carried
out in letter or spirit. But the Treaty
of Paris had been submerged by the ' Bul-
garian atrocities,' the Russo-Turkish war of
1877, and the Treaty of Berlin, and it was

records his generous intentions towards the Christian
population of his Empire, and wishing to give a
further proof of his sentiments in that respect, has
resolved to communicate to the Contracting Powers
the said firman, emanating spontaneously from his
sovereign will.'

The firman, thus emanating and thus communi-
cated, so that in reality it forms part of the Treaty of
Paris, is the Hatti-Sherif, issued March 5, 1856, and
contains the clauses :

'Thanks to the Almighty, from day to day the
happiness of the nation and the wealth of my
dominions go on increasing.

* My most earnest desire is to insure the happiness
of all classes of the subjects whom Divine Providence
has placed under my Imperial sceptre.

* The guarantees promised by the Hatti-Humayoun
are confirmed.

' Every distinction or designation tending to make
any class of Turkish subjects inferior to another
class, on account of religion, language, or race,
shall be for ever eflfaced from the Administrative
Protocol.

* All subjects shall be admissible to public employ-
ments.

* All suits between subjects of different religions
shall be referred to mixed tribunals conducted in
public.

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164 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

of these things and of our responsibilities
involved in them that a dim remembrance
still survived. It was remembered that by
the Treaty of San Stefano, which Russia
concluded with Turkey at the gates of Con-
stantinople early in 1878, practically the
whole of the district we call Macedonia
received its freedom as part of the Princi-
pality of Bulgaria, and that but for the
intervention of England in support of her
own supposed interests, none of these
massacres and outrages would have hap-
pened, but the country would have made as
much progress in peace and security as
Bulgaria itself has made. It was remem-
bered, too, that the Treaty of Berlin was
due almost entirely to England's desire (in
Lord Beaconsfield's words at the Congress)

'Prisons shall be reformed so as to reconcile the
rights of humanity with those of justice.

* Everything that resembles torture shall be entirely
abolished.

' The police shall be reorganized so as to give all
peaceable subjects the strongest guarantees for safety
of person and property.

* Taxes shall be levied from all equally, and a
system of direct collection shall be substituted for
the plan of tax-farming in all branches of the State
revenues.

* The local taxes shall be imposed so as not to affect
the sources of production.

* Steps shall be taken for the construction of roads
and canals.'

THE CASE OF MACEDONIA 165

* to strengthen Turkey as much as possible/
and that by that treaty the three vilayets
which we call Macedonia were again restored
to the Sultan's dominion, with such results
as we see.

Another thing was called to mind.
When Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Bulgaria
were rescued from Turkish rule, while Rou-
mania and Servia obtained absolute inde-
pendence, but the vilayets of Macedonia
were given back after their brief glimpse of
liberty, the Sultan pledged himself with
every due solemnity to introduce reforms
and establish good government there. By
Articles in the Treaty he expressly under-
took to observe a similar constitution to
the Organic Law of Crete (which provided
a legislative and elected Assembly, reformed
Courts, and a Governor-General who might
be a Christian), as well as entire equality for
all reliofions in the matter of tribunals and
public employments. ■'^

* The main clauses concerned are as follows :

Article XXHI. — 'Similar laws to the Organic Law
of 1868 in Crete, adapted to local requirements, shall
also be introduced into the other parts of Turkey
in Europe, for which no special organization has been
provided by the present Treaty.

'The Sublime Porte shall depute special Commis-
sions, in which the native element shall be largely
represented, to settle the details of the new laws in
each province.

166 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

England even went so far in 1880 as to
send out Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice as
member of the Commi ssion appointed under
Article XXIIL, and his report to Lord
Granville contains some criticisms which
go to the heart of the whole question of
Turkish reforms. Writing on the entire
inadequacy of the new ^ Law of the Vilayets/
he observed :

* The new law continues the same bad system of
local administration which has done so much to ruin
this country. It spreads a complicated, and, at the
same time, highly centralized, system of local govern-
ment over the land. It presupposes the existence of
a large number of capable and honest men, while, as
a matter of fact, it is notorious that one of the chief
difficulties in Turkey is to find a sufficient number of
persons able to perform the most ordinary duties of
administration. Complete efficiency is the only thing

* The schemes of organization resulting from these
labours shall be submitted for examination to the
Sublime Porte, which, before promulgating the Acts
for putting them into force, shall consult the European
Commission instituted for Eastern Roumelia.

Article LXII. — * In no part of the Ottoman Empire
shall diflference of religion be alleged against any
person as a ground for exclusion or incapacity as
regards the discharge of civil and political rights,
admission to the public employments, functions, and
honours, or the exercise of the various professions
and industries.

* All persons shall be permitted, without any dis-
tinction of religion, to give evidence before the
tribunals/

THE CASE OF MACEDONIA 167

which can make such a system endurable. The result
in Turkey has been nothing except the creation of an
enormous class of officials sent from Constantinople,
who make it their principal business to prevent any-
thing being done, and are an enormous burden to the
provinces.*

And again, in a later despatch, Lord
Edmond Fitzmaurice wrote :

* Judging from the past conduct of the Porte, it is
not unreasonable to suppose that every attempt will
be made, by delays and subterfuges, to evade the
acceptance of the new law. ... If the Porte is
sufficiently ill-advised to reject the counsels of the
Powers, and to refuse to set its house in order, it
requires no extraordinary foresight to understand
that the days of the Turkish Empire in Europe will,
in that case, ere long be numbered. 't

One cannot say what limit the writer
may have implied in the phrase 'ere long.'
Twenty -four years have passed, and though
it is, of course, still quite certain that the
days of the Turkish Empire in Europe are
numbered, the growing jealousies of the
Powers, the growing indifference of England
to the cry of oppression, and the growing
commercialism of Germany, have given the
fabric an appearance of greater strength
than it wore in 1880, when Mr. Gladstone

* To Lord Granville, ^Turkey, No. 15 (1880),'
p. 15.

t To Lord Granville, 'Turkey, No. 15 (1880),'
p. 244.

168 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

has just come into power. In every other
respect Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice's insight
and foresight have been justified.

However, after Lord Beaconsfield had
secured peace with honour — such honour
as consists in handing back enfranchised
slaves to their masters — England did make
a few gasping attempts, like this mission of
Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice, to secure some
sort of protection for the peoples she had
sacrificed. Then, in common with the
other Powers, she forgot them, hoping all
was well, and having a large amount of
other business on hand. There is one
military command thoroughly understood
in Turkey ; it is the command, * As you
were.' It would be too much to say the
Turks hastened to obey it, but they dawdled,
loitered, and yawned back into their former
state. In a year or two it was seen there
had been no change. Under no paper
reform scheme ever yet devised has there
been any change in Turkey. Year after
year the old abuses continued, as unchecked
by the tender mercies of the Powers after
the Berlin Treaty as by the Sultan's ' con-
stant solicitude for the welfare of his
subjects ^ after the Treaty of Paris. They
continue still. The Christians are still for-
bidden to bear arms, while every Moham-
medan may go about hung with weapons,

THE CASE OF MACEDONIA 169

like an ancient trophy or a military Christ-
mas-tree. The taxes are still farmed, and
a nominal tithe of the produce becomes an
eighth under the tax-collector's pressure.
The Christian villages still have to employ
the bekchi, or rural guards, for defence, and
must still pay them in cash, in food and
lodging, and in blackmail, or, failing black-
mail, in rights over the women and mar-
riageable girls. They still have to pay the
Turkish landowner close upon half their
produce as rent, not to mention an un-
limited amount of forced labour in Turkish
fields. The assessments, both of taxes and
rent, are capricious as well as ruinous.
The harvest must be left on the field till it
is valued, and the zaptiehs often carry off
the whole. Justice is still a matter of
baksheesh, and a victim must be bought
out or be left to rot in gaol. Villages are
pillaged, men are murdered, women are
outraged with impunity, because a Christ-
ian's evidence does not count against a
Turk's. Torture is freely used to induce
confession, and, especially under the excuse
of the search for hidden arms, almost
unimaginable cruelties are practised even by
regular officers. "^^^

* Instances of torture, as at Konsko, where two
regular officers confessed to their abominations, will
be found in the Bluebooks — e.g., 'Turkey, No. 2

170 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

It has been well said by a writer in the
Times of April 2, 1904:

' It is not the actual bloodshed, the occasional out-
breaks of savagery, that do most to render Hfe intoler-
able in Turkey. Far more serious is the absence of
security, the sense that a catastrophe is always possible,
the pervading fear that stays men's hands and fills their
days with panics and suspicions.'

But, unhappily, it is only the actual
bloodshed, only the occasional outbreaks of
savagery, that attract the attention of
Europe. Prolonged misery and perpetual
degradation are easily disregarded as be-
longing to the nature of things. It is only
when blood is poured out at random, and
the tale of outrage rises to a cry, that the
officials who direct the Great Powers are
compelled unwillingly to listen. IndiiFer-
ence then becomes dangerous, for people
outside the Turkish frontiers do not like to
hear of their own kin suffering the outrage
and butchery from which they themselves
have lately escaped ; and, besides, there are
a considerable number of people scattered
throughout Europe who still possess bowels

(1904)'— Report for October 30, 1903. For other
abuses, see Mr. Arthur Evans' letter to the TiTneSj
October 1, 1903; Mr. H. N. Brailsford's article in
the Fortnightly for September, 1903; and Mr. Noel
Buxton on 'The Macedonian Question' (Byron Society,
1902).

THE CASE OF MACEDONIA 171

of compassion, and so the insurrection of
despair arises. It does not aim at victory
or success. It aims at disaster, and its
only hope is that the horror of its suppres-
sion may reach the ears that are deaf to all
the appeals of justice unless accompanied
by the cries of murder.

As far as horrors go, the movement has
lately succeeded almost beyond expectation.
The butchery began in 1902, gradually
increasing up to the autumn of that year.
In the spring of 1903, while the first
Austro- Russian scheme of reforms was
helplessly collapsing, the massacres rapidly
developed. After a lull of a few weeks
during harvest, they broke out again with
extreme violence in August, and lasted
about two months. Going through part of
the vilayet of Monastir in October and
November, when a Turkish peace had been
re-established, I found practically all the
villages of Bulgarian Christians pillaged
and destroyed by fire. The bones of the
massacred were lying about among the
ruins of their homes, or recent graves
marked the places where the unarmed
victims had fallen. The survivors, who
had escaped to the mountains, were then
returning to the ruins, and making little
hutches of straw in which they spent the
winter. They were trying to live upon

172 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

little stores of maize, which they pounded
between stones, and there was much sick-
ness and death. Many of the women still
lay stupefied by the horrors they had
undergone. Girls had lost their reason on
finding themselves with child from viola-
tion, and were howling like dogs. The
wounded were rotting alive, not daring
even to seek dressing for their wounds.
By plunder or fire the villagers had lost
everything they possessed — cattle, furniture,
clothes, implements, seed, and all the
needlework, rugs, and bedding which they
spend years in making for the dowry of
their daughters.

In the vilayet of Monastir alone there
were about 120 villages in ruins, and but
for the relief distributed by Henry Brails-
ford, Mrs. Brailsford, and a few other
English people, the villagers would have
died by thousands. It was the Sultan's
hope that they w^ould die. In October
Misurus Pasha in London was instructed
to ask Lord Lansdowne to stop the relief.
Lord Lansdowne naturally replied that he
was * shocked beyond measure' at such a
request, adding that the condition of the
people was mainly the consequence of the
conduct of Turkish troops, and that im-
measurably greater ruin and destruction
had been wrought by the Turkish soldiers

THE CASE OF MACEDONIA 173

than by the insurgents'* — a statement which
must have been welcomed as a salutary
chastisement by the Prime Minister, who in
his ignorance had dared to talk about the
* balance of criminality ' lying with the
insurgents themselves. f It is true that
for very shame our Ambassador at Con-
stantinople was compelled to explain this
phrase as of purely Parliamentary character,
disguised for purposes of esoteric debate;
but it will stick to Mr. Balfour as a label of
official indifference or misinformed credulity.
Thus the tale of horrors duly followed
the rising against intolerable wrongs —
wrongs which the Christian peoples of
Macedonia have suffered for five centuries
rather than abandon their ancient form of
religion. But the only answer of Europe
to the appeal of blood was the second
Austro-Eussian reform scheme, constructed
at Miirsteg, and published in October, 1903.
On this occasion also England, like the
other Powers, handed over her responsibili-
ties to the two which had ' the chief interest '
in the districts concerned. Certainly they
had the chief interest, just as two residuary
legatees might be said to have the chief
interest in watching a house where the

* Macedonian Bluebook, 'Turkey, No. 2 (1904),'
p. 47.

t Speech in Commons, August, 1903.

174 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

testator was being murdered. I mean
their interest was obvious, but it did not
necessarily coincide with the interest of the
suffering party. All winter long, during
the invaluable months when some sign of
hope might have been shown to a desperate
people, the scheme was being idly discussed
amidst all the comfort of Oriental diplo-
macy. With entire success, the Porte fell
back upon its arts of prevarication and
delay. Those who knew the country best
never thought very highly of the scheme,
but the clause appointing international
officers to command the gendarmerie did at
least promise something that the villagers
could see with their own eyes. Bit by bit
the scheme, which was declared to be 'the
irreducible minimum, '"* was reduced. Bit
by bit its essentials were whittled away,
and now that spring has come (I write in
May, 1904) we are left with two Civil
Agents, who are supposed to sit for the
cause of justice beside Hilmi Pasha, and
do actually dine with him, but are other-
wise admitted, even by Lord Lansdowne,

* 'Turkey, No. 2 (1904),* November 13, 1903.
Count Lamsdorff stated to Mr. Spring-Rice at
St. Petersburg the reforms for Macedonia were
* the irreducible minimum.' Writing to Sir Nicholas
O'Conor on October 29, 1903, Lord Lansdowne said
the reforms of the previous February were ' a minimum
of what was indispensable.'

THE CASE OF MACEDONIA 175

to be entirely useless.^ We are left with
twenty -five instead of sixty European
officers, who will wear a kind of Turkish
uniform, far from reassuring to the villagers,
and, instead of holding command in the
gendarmerie, will act only as a sort of
inspectors. The non-commissioned officers,
who were to have assisted in the reorganiza-
tion, have disappeared from view. So have
the other clauses.

Lord Lansdowne has stated that, if the
scheme failed, England reserved to herself
the entire liberty to take into considera-
tion and to propose alternative and more
far-reaching measures. f What limit is to
mark the failure ? Is blood again to
be our only assurance of oppression ?
Hitherto the one definite efi^ect of the
reform schemes has been to increase the
centralization, founded on suspicion and
distrust, which is the vice of Turkish
administration, so far as it administers at
all. I Instead of the Consuls, we have the
useless Civil Agents ; instead of the Yalis,
we have Hilmi Pasha. Let us be just to a
remarkable man in a hopeless position.
Hilmi is, perhaps, the hardest working
Turk ever born. There is no limit to the

* Speech in the Lords, May 6, 1904.

t Speech on the Address, February 2, 1904.

i Letter of a Times correspondent, April 2, 1904.

176 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

number of officials lie will see, the number
of despatches he vvill read, the number of
orders he will give. But no one seems a
penny the better. The more serious and
honourable we assume his intentions to be,
the more hopeless is his position. On one
side he has the Sultan, on the other that
host of administrators who cannot adminis-
trate. We are brought back to the central
error which Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice
pointed out : we are dealing with a system
' which presupposes the existence of a large
number of capable and honest men, while,
as a matter of fact, it is notorious that one
of the chief difficulties in Turkey is to find
a sufficient number of persons able to per-
form the most ordinary duties of administra-
tion.' It is not that Turkey will not
reform ; she cannot reform. It is in vain
that Hilmi Pasha wastes his life giving
audiences and dictating orders. Realities
do not enter into his existence. The true
condition of the villagers — their sufferings,
oppression, and complaints — mean no more
to him than his decrees for their immediate
amelioration mean to them. He might as
well decree reforms for the Dog Star. One
cannot say whether he is the greatest soul
now doomed to the officials' paradise, but
even in that circle of limbo it is hard to
imagine a soul more hopelessly damned.

THE CASE OF MACEDONIA 177

As for England, she stands as she has
twice stood before — in 1876 and 1896 —
clutching at any fear and any scruple that
may seem to condone inaction and stifle the
protest of honour. In 1876, when Servia
rose, Lord Beaconsfield, then our Prime
Minister, exclaimed in horror that * the
secret societies of Europe had declared war
upon Turkey.' In 1904 Mr. Balfour ex-
claims in horror that we will not allow our-
selves to be made the cat's-paw of any
revolutionary intrigues."^' In 1896 Lord
Salisbury, then our Prime Minister, de-
spaired of saving Armenia because we could
not send our fleet to Lake Van. In 1904
Mr. Balfour despairs of saving Macedonia
because some of the difficulties are * irre-
mediable.'! Both excuses are welcome.
Where other people*s troubles are con-
cerned there is nothing so soothing as
despair. It acquits us of effort. And as
to the insurgents, comfortable people with
settled habits and secure livelihood feel a
natural distrust of the unhappy who will
not keep still. Our poorer brethren are
picturesque and interesting objects as long
as they submit themselves dutifully to the
powers that be ; but let the starving, out-
raged, and persecuted people of the earth

* Speech to Primrose League, Albert Hall, May 6,
1904. t Ibid.

12

178 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

raise a little finger in their own defence, all
the rattlesnakes of apprehensive prosperity
are aroused, and in terror or contempt they
join the common hiss against ' secret
societies,' ' revolutionary intrigues,' and
'anarchists.' It is an old tale. We re-
member Mazzini, Garibaldi, Kossuth, and
all the other champions of freedom, and we
pass on.

For ourselves there are two main things
to consider. In the first place, is there to
be a Statute of Limitations for national
honour ? If the terms of a treaty are
troublesome and inconvenient, is there a limit
of years after which we may let them slide
without disgrace ? In hopes of securing
certain supposed advantages for ourselves,
we gave these people over to the misrule
which has brought them to their present
misery, while we eased our consciences by
extracting promises of reform. The promises
have never been fulfilled, but we continue
to hold our supposed advantages. Would
it not have been more honest to have fixed
a date after which the Turk might begin to
ravish and murder without our concern ?
It is not as though the problem in Macedonia
were insoluble. There have been mixed
races and rival races in all the countries
and States that have been delivered from
Turkish dominion, and all without exception

THE CASE OF MACEDONIA 179

have prospered. In the lesser instances of
the Lebanon, Eastern Eoumelia and Crete,
the appointment of a Governor not respon-
sible to Constantinople, but to some of the
Powers themselves, was sufficient to estab-
lish tranquillity, and the * revolutionary
intrigues ' in Macedonia aim at nothing
more. There is no reason to suppose that
under such a government the Bulgarian
villagers, though now degraded and stupefied
by five centuries of oppression, would not
rise to the level of their kinspeople over the
frontier, who possess many of the best
qualities to be found in the Balkan Penin-
sula. The so-called Greeks, who are in
most cases Slavs or Roumanians by descent,
would quickly acquiesce in a rule that
secured them trade and justice, while the
territorial claims of the Athenian politicians
can be ignored after their unspeakable
treachery in aiding the Sultan to retain
Christians under the yoke from which they
themselves have been delivered by the help of
the Powers. As to Albania, that will be
the next province to win unity and indepen-
dence, and the Albanians, being the dominant
race in their country, and having the right
to bear arms, are peculiarly capable of look-
ing after themselves.

To the English traveller in Macedonia,
and in Albania, too, it is pathetic to observe

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180 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

with what trustful confidence the people
turn their eyes to England still. Balked,
forsaken, betrayed and disappointed as they
have been time after time, they still look to
us as the nation capable of unselfish justice
and as the truest vindicators of freedom.
In spite of our Turkish policy, which has
threatened to become a tradition, it seems as
though they perceived instinctively that
higher tradition of which Mr. Gladstone
spoke :

'There were other days when England was the
hope of freedom. Wherever in the world a high
aspiration was entertained, or a noble blow was
struck, it was to England that the eyes of the
oppressed were always turned. You talk to me of
the established tradition and policy in regard to
Turkey. I appeal to an established tradition older,
wider, nobler far — a tradition, not which disregards
British interests, but which teaches you to seek the
promotion of those interests in obeying the dictates
of honour and justice.'*

The words suggest the second considera-
tion now before us in this crisis : What kind
of a reputation do we wish our country to
have in foreign affairs ? In the present
condition of Turkey we see an instance of
Empire — an extreme instance in the horror
of its results, it is true, but difi'ering in no
main principle from any Empire which
seeks to extend its power over diverse and

* Speech in the House of Commons, May 7, 1877.

THE CASE OF MACEDONIA 181

reluctant peoples. In Russia, Austria, and
Germany we see other instances of Empire.
We see that, in the mere expectation of
being able at some future time to extend
their power over diverse and reluctant
peoples, they are now making themselves
the sport of the Sultan, while with perfunc-
tory and mitigated protests they contemplate
the ruin, massacre, and possible extermina-
tion of the men and women they are pledged
to defend. We ourselves in recent years
have done much to bring the ideals and
methods of our own Empire down to the
level of these other Imperial States. By
our devastations of the Boer Republics, by
our resolve to subjugate those free com-
munities against their will, we have provided
even the Sultan and Hilmi Pasha with
examples which they naturally quote with
great effect. By our refusal to Ireland of
liberties which the rest of the United King-
dom has long enjoyed, we have allowed our
enemies to say that our zeal for freedom and
self-government can be shut off when we
please. Our action on these two points
within the last ten years has not only
tarnished our most enviable prestige, it has
lowered the standard of international
morality throughout the world. We have
provided an excuse and defence for others
whose aims are more openly selfish and

182 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

despotic than our own. But throughout
the Near East the memory of our policy
under Canning, Russell, and Gladstone still
lingers. One of the shrewdest and most
influential of our Consuls in Turkey told
me last November that the first question
people asked themselves out there was still
* What will England say ?' It is not too
late to retrieve our reputation as a race
capable of chivalry, humanity, and a dis-
interested love of freedom. It is not too
late to abandon the bagman's ideal which
calls the flag an asset and measures success
by the acquisition of markets, and to revert
to that other tradition which is 'older, wider,
nobler far.'

THE CASE OF SOUTH AFRICA

By J. L. Hammond

THE South African War, with all its
tangled motives and its miscellaneous
enthusiasms, was a great crisis in the struggle
between Imperialism and Nationalism. It
was, of course, much else as well. It was
partly the result of financial influences,
whose genius, power, success, and detach-
ment from all national preoccupations are
daily becoming more clearly recognised.
It was partly the result of rivalries that had
been sharpened into exasperations by the
persistent malice with which two races had
been told that they hated each other. It
was condoned, or supported, by many who
thought that our position in South Africa was
threatened, and that a great manifestation
of our resources and our tenacity was neces-
sary to establish and fortify our interests.
But, amid all these forces, panic, anger, the
sting of violent memories, the bewilderments
and perplexities of fatalism, one passion
emerges into a dignity and importance of its
own, for it was the passion that sustained
the war, the passion known as Imperialism,
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184 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS^ CLUB

or a genuine, unhesitating, devoted belief
that we were conquering a misgoverned
country, in order to endow it with a benefi-
cent civilization ; to bestow on it some
unique and sovereign order of things, of
which we alone possessed the secret.

That fanaticism survived disappointments,
surprises, and even the strain — for however
much human nature is hardened in a pro-
tracted war, it is a strain — the strain of
inflicting a great deal of undeserved misery
on the defenceless. Other things reinforced
this constancy, but the main reason that
men who recognised that they were passing
the harrow over a brave population defend-
ing its freedom kept their composure, their
happiness, and their determination, was that
they believed they were doing a grim duty.
They could not hide from themselves the
horrors of what they were doing. To burn
and waste a country, to impose on women a
life of hunted and homeless vagrancy, to
organize famine, to buy from the enemy^s
ranks all the perfidy at the hire of victorious
invasion — these things were odious, and only
not intolerable to many of the sujDporters of
the war. They were borne, they were accepted,
they were almost praised, just because Im-
perialism is a religion, a religion sparing no
man and no nation. Man will do or sanction
cruel things from avarice, from fear, or from

THE CASE OF SOUTH AFRICA 185

a challenged obstinacy ; but no cruelty is so
determined as that which is presented in the
light of the sacrifices demanded by a faith
austere and single-eyed. What was human
freedom, what was love of country, what
were the little transitory lives of men and
women, their homes, their customs, their
paltry affections, in that hour of stern and
rapacious duty ?

If this one passion, implacable and in-
exorable, maintained the war for conquest
it was one passion, implacable and inexor-
able, that maintained the war for freedom.
This was clear, at any rate, before the
war was ended. Many English people had
invested the Boer imagination with a
Napoleonic grandeur of aggression. They
had supposed that the reluctance of these
farmers, whose minds moved slowly, to fling
their franchise to a very various and trouble-
some population of immigrants concealed
some grandiose ambition of driving the
British into the sea. Or they pointed to the
mind of the Boer President, apt to dwell on
fixed ideas and prejudices, unfriendly to
strangers, scanning suspiciously the most
innocent diplomacy, darkened by a morose
piety, dominated by anxious and disquieting
memories, as a proof that the Boer belonged
to an unteachable past, and that the war was
the consequence of his repugnance to any-

186 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

thing modern or enlightened. These were
favourite theories in the early months of the
war. Later it was suggested that if peace
lingered it was because the leaders of the
commandoes had an interest in war, or had
ceased to have an interest in civilized govern-
ment. But the last months of the war
silenced these negligible hypotheses in all
but negligible quarters. The brunt of that
long-drawn resistance was borne hymen who
had befriended reform, hospitality, and an
extended franchise in the Transvaal, who had
known no serious quarrel with the British,
and loved their country with a patriotism
that was tolerant, and genial, and free from
the rancour and suspicion of the past. What-
ever might have been thought of the earlier
phases of the war, nobody could have sup-
posed that General Botha, or General de la
Eey, or General de Wet, or President Steyn,
chose the lingering miseries of the last year
of that hopeless struggle because they did
not wish to see the Outlanders enfranchised,
or because they hoped to rid South Africa of
one of its two white races. It was not some
odd perversity that made General de Wet
choose to ride like a thief into the town his
father had named. There was nothing
ambiguous or equivocal in their conduct or
its motives. It is true that men, who had
often praised war as the solvent of the selfish

THE CASE OF SOUTH AFRICA 187

apathies of peace, refused to believe that any
set of reasonable human beings could act as
these Boer farmers were acting, and disobey
so obvious a duty as that which bade them
sacrifice their country rather than prolong
the miseries of resistance. But for the
Boers those ancient phrases about love of
country and war as the great ordeal — so
often on the lips of men whose endurance is
vicarious — were here on mortal trial. They
loved the freedom of their country, even
with that country in rags and ruins, better
than all the pleasant gifts of the con-
queror, even when the conqueror offered
to change the sword for golden plough-
shares. They thought of desertion what
Lord Halsbury thought of resistance — that
it was madness. This everyone knows who
has read the story of what was probably
the last conversation Christian de Wet was
to hold with his brother Piet de Wet in this
world. The war had sifted out the weak,
the doubtful, the men who put their human
pity before their country. The survivors
had had burnt into their minds the horrors
of what they were doing. They rode and
rode over the charred veldt ; they saw,
wasted and dishevelled, the lonely and silent
farms they had won from savage nature and
savage man ; they watched the sure advance
of famine ; they knew that their women were

188 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS^ CLUB

dying as the natives died in the Bombay
plague ; but they were sustained by a passion
strong enough to bear the strain of watching
all this misery inflicted on the defenceless.
For them their duty was stern and unmis-
takable. It was not until they realized
that resistance meant the annihilation of
their race that the twelve Boer leaders met
at midnight in a small room to sign away
the freedom of the two republics.

All that was great, constant, lasting in
the conflict belonged then to one or other
of these qualities. What made the war
a great crivsis in this spiritual struggle was
not only that Imperialism had conquered
Nationalism in the fleld, but also that the Im-
perialists had conquered the Nationalists in
their struggle for the mastery of the national
mind of England. The fact is a catastrophe,
but the reason is not obscure. In the general
reaction and fatigue that had settled down
over politics since the defeat of Home Rule,
men had lost their grip of so simple and
elementary a part of Western Liberalism as
the doctrine that the identity of a nation is
to be respected. Imperialism captured and
usurped the mind of England, largely
because it found that mind vacant and
groping. Imperialism is a most formidable
power. It draws in its orbit many strange
and sinister enthusiasms, but it remains a

THE CASE OF SOUTH AFRICA 189

religion, a creed of duty, an ideal of devoted
self-sacrifice, a vision of British power order-
ing, enlightening, and developing the world.
It depends, of course, on reasons of force ;
but it implies discipline, self-devotion, un-
sparing energy, and it honestly believes it is
serving humanity, and it would resent to be
identified with mere conquest. This factor,
which ought to have been fought directly,
was fought for the most part obliquely. It
ought to have been fought on its essential
pretensions, and not on its accidental impli-
cations ; it was fought, for the most part, on
the margin of contingent mistake rather
than on the ground of its capital and central
error. Of course, there were a thousand
minor causes to create this confusion and
unreality. The tedious details of diplomacy,
the picturesque metaphors about centuries
in conflict, the impressions of the Boers as
slave-drivers, all these helped to distract men
from the main point of the dispute. The
dispute was not between century and cen-
tury, between a racial oligarchy and a cosmo-
politan democracy, between the sombre
brutality of Puritans and the gentle philan-
throphy of Methodists ; the dispute centred
round the question whether we were justified
in imposing our own will, our own habits,
our own civilization, on a white self-govern-
ing community that clung, through the

190 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

fiercest ordeal national resolution can face,
to its own identity. The controversy, as
regards this fundamental and vital difference,
came to resemble that Greek battle in which
the two armies edged away, the one to the
right, the other to the left, until they were
no longer in sight of each other. Men
disputed fiercely on other subjects, the
degree of ferocity which war licenses and
Christianity condones, the limits of prudence,
the best way of sapping resistance ; but
there was only one passion that was strong
and simple enough to withstand the con-
centrated power of Imperialism, and that
passion, the passion for nationality, was unfor-
tunately languid and lukewarm. Mr. Glad-
stone had conquered Imperialism because he
appealed to the imagination through his
eloquent sense for freedom as powerfully
as Imperialism appealed to it through the
fascinations of power. He could make of
his own passion for freedom a real spell to
cast over the popular mind. It is always
an intoxicating idea, the idea that your
country is not merely the instrument of a
unique culture, but the unique instrument
of culture; that it offers to the world
such a splendour of civilization and such a
perfection of government that the will and
identity of a small people are of no account
in the large and mysterious fulfilment of

THE CASE OF SOUTH AFRICA 191

your destiny. One theory alone can oppose
this maenad passion. It is not a vague and
roving affection for humanity, a generous
horror of cruelty and oppression, but a stern,
inflexible belief that the right of the smallest
people to be its own master is absolute and
sacred. Mr. Gladstone was permeated by
this sense. He did not, like other and less
successful critics, complain of Imperialism
that it went too far here, or wasted its
strength there, or was not quite circumspect
somewhere else ; he boldly attacked its
main inspiration as a fatal poison to the
springs of justice and popular right and
free government. If the idea of a nation
ceases to be sacred, the idea of conquest
ceases to be barbarous. Conquest seemed
an innocent and even an exhilarating thing
to Englishmen in 1902, just because they
had rejected this fundamental article of
liberal patriotism, that it was better that
a white nation should govern itself, however
badly, than that a foreign people should
govern it, however well.

The desire then that subjugated the
armies of the two republics in the field
and also the Liberalism of England was
the desire to make the government of the
Boers the revelation of British ideas, and
the expression of British character. It was
an idea that Nationalists thought wrong ;

192 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

it was an idea they also thought impractic-
able. For the men who rejoiced in this
usurpation were confronted by the clear
and indisputable fact that nowhere does the
public opinion of England do what it was
expected to do in this ease — govern a
strange white community. It may obstruct
and thwart a great many things that the
strange community wants. Perhaps the
chief contribution of the public opinion of
England to the government of Ireland has
been to prevent the Irish people from
having the University it would like. But
as far as the actual government of a white
subject people is concerned, public opinion
in England abdicates from the hour of
conquest. England abandoned the task in
Canada ; allowed Canada to choose its
religion, its laws, its government, its flag.
Where the task of direction is not abandoned,
it is delegated. The power that guides
British opinion in its judgments on Irish
politics is not a knowledge of Irish wants
or history, but the presence of a faction
which has a direct interest in a particular
kind of particularist government. That is
the only Ireland that is in contact with
British opinion. It is the same thing in
South Africa. The only South Africa that
is in contact with British opinion, that
colours the sources of information, that

THE CASE OF SOUTH AFRICA 193

influences the origins of action and agita-
tion, is a faction which has a direct interest
in making England do certain things or
abstain from doing certain things. The
England that governs South Africa is
Rhodesian England, that powerful faction
of titled avarice. It would be the merest
mockery to pretend that the people of these
islands, with their incessant problems, their
preoccupations, their still more distracting
amusements, give a constant, vigilant, in-
telligent attention to the wants, habits,
laws, and fortunes of the white races they
nominally govern. They govern those
races not by public opinion, but by private
and fragmentary interest. A few men, like
Mr. Gladstone, can make masses of men
feel the wrongs they inflict as keenly as
they feel the wrongs they suffer, but those
hurricanes of misgiving and remorse come
but rarely to shake the complacent com-
posure with which a community neglects
its subjects. In ordinary times, the direct
interest of men who twist all the machines
of administration and intelligence to their
own purposes bears down the spasmodic
pressure of an enthusiasm for justice and
good government. The implication of
Imperialism is that it is better that a par-
ticular community should be governed by
the public opinion of England than that it

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194 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

should be governed by its own public opinion.
In practice it is governed by neither.

It may be argued that this is putting too
strict and severe a construction on the idea
of Imperial Government. It may be said
that when we talk of British rule in the
Transvaal we do not mean that the Trans-
vaal is to be directed in all the details of its
life by a supervising democracy, but merely
that the officials who govern it are British
officials, steeped in British traditions, repre-
senting the British attitude to life, progress,
order, and administration. This, of course,
is true, though its corollaries are too often
forgotten. For it means that the idea of
democratic Imperialism is definitely aban-
doned. The larger the field of British rule,
the more extended the empire, not of the
democracy, but of the governing classes.
The proletariat may be flattered as the
rulers of this distant population, but in
point of fact the proletariat has very little
to say about the way that population is
governed. Indeed, every extension of the
Empire adds so much to the preponderant
share the governing classes have already in
the management of the Empire. If the
only South Africa that is in contact with
British opinion at home is the financial
community, South Africa knows England
only through its official class.

THE CASE OF SOUTH AFRICA 195

But that official class, it is argued,
interprets and reflects the British point of
view in its administration, and thougli it is
drawn from a section of the governing
population, it is in practice representative.
it executes the will of Great Britain in the
Transvaal, and it envisages her civilization.

This would seem to be a profoundly
mistaken view of the government of the
Transvaal. That government is not sus-
pended in mid-air. It is not a system to
be stamped without resistance on an
absolutely passive and receptive surface.
It must lean on something. In India
official government depends on one of the
strongest elements in human government,
the power of a long tradition of honest,
public- spirited administration — a school of
government in itself developing its own
virtues, its own resources, its own character.
In South Africa the situation is widely
different. The Government is not imposing
an impartial discipline over a world of
Oriental populations ; it is in the midst of
various active and powerful influences
from which it is quite unable to detach
itself Nobody, for example, could attribute
to Lord Milner that Roman neutrality, that
severe independence of the quarrels and
emulations of the soil which you look for
in an absolute governor, who treats with

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196 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

merciless justice and equality all the com-
peting interests of the community he
governs. Lord Milner throws himself into
those quari:els ; he takes a hand in the
manoeuvres and strategy of civil strife ; he is
proud to be regarded as the leader of one of
the two contending parties in the State ; he
has repudiated with vehemence the notion
that he could be other than a partisan.
His Government is, in other words, the
Government of party.

There are two centres of pressure in
South Africa. One is the Boer national
feeling; the other is the power of the
financial houses. Official government can-
not repose on the first, for it is its aim to
disestablish it. What patience, for ex-
ample, have the officials who carry on the
work of education in the Transvaal — men
who seek to establish what they think the
best and most modern arrangements, with
the Boer attachment to his language, his
religion, his self-government? All these
emotions are obstacles, and so obsessed are
the officials with the importance of replacing
the schools that foster and focus Dutch
feeling by institutions that will introduce
British ideas, that one of them gravely
suggested our transplanting to South Africa
a nucleus of unsuccessful boys fii-om our
public schools in order to develop there

THE CASE OF SOUTH AFRICA 197

imitation Etons and Winchesters. This is
Imperialism, and it means, of course, a
constant warfare with all the things that
bind the Boers to their past, and bind them
the more powerfully the more Boer senti-
ment is challenged. To Lord Milner the
chief difficulty in the development of South
Africa along British ideas is the tenacity
with which the Boers cling to their own
individuality.

In this respect every development of
official government increases the distance
that separates the Boer from the official.
The official rejoices over every new tract
added to the empire of red-tape, over every
expansion of the rule of schedule and
registers. The Boer sees something very
different in the administrative development ;
he sees his traditions despised, his senti-
ments outraged, his national history of
hardly- won and hardly-lost freedom con-
signed to an unrespected and unpitied past.
A governor who rules in spite of the will
of the ruled has to take what allies he can,
the leavings of the nation, such as the
National Scouts, and particularist interests,
such as the financial faction in South
Africa. That is the moral of Irish history.
It is the explanation of what is at first
sight a paradox in South Africa. Lord
Milner, the candid and outspoken enemy

198 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS^ CLUB

of the Boer, is become the representative of
that other great power, the financial houses.
These houses man his council, control and
subsidize his press, and it invariably
happens that the actual course of govern-
ment in the Transvaal coincides with their
own wishes. The result is that the actual
government of the country does not repre-
sent the wishes or ideas of the governing
country any more than it represents those
of the governed. It is the result of the
pressure of certain interests on the kind of
administration that is most likely of all to
yield to that pressure, not because it is
dishonest, corrupt, or particularly inefficient,
but simply because it depends, more or less
consciously, on those interests in proportion
as it is hostile to the national sentiment.
It is not British administration imposing
external peace. It is British administration
mastered by local factions.

A most dramatic example has illuminated
the strange scene within the last few months.
What infinitesimal proportion of the people
of England want Chinese labour in South
Africa ? What proportion of the people
of South Africa want it, if you subtract the
financial houses and all their outlying
parts? Of the answer there is no doubt.
Nobody would pretend that the British
people, when they went to war to stamp

THE CASE OF SOUTH AFRICA 199

the country with British ideas, meant to
divide the Rand between two Oriental races,
and to create this great system of yellow
serf labour. The introduction of Chinese
labour is an overwhelming social and in-
dustrial revolution in the Transvaal. If it
had happened under Boer government it
would have been an outrage; happening
under what is ironically called our rule, it
is not less than a sensation. It is only
possible because when you govern a white
nation against its will, you govern it
through its worst passions, and those
passions are more or less your masters.
The British garrison in Ireland was strong
enough in the eighteenth century to make
England choose civil war in Ireland rather
than Catholic Emancipation. The British
garrison in South Africa was strong enough
in the twentieth to force Chinese labour on
an England that detested it. No more
unanswerable proof could be wanted of the
truth that Imperialism creates in South
Africa an order which reflects neither the
great aims and purposes of the governing
people nor those of the governed. It has
not enriched humanity with a new type of
society, blending and reconciling all the
best elements in two powerful races. It
has merely thrown on to the world what
will be among civilizations a Quasimodo.

PATRIOTISM AND EDUCATION

By Reginald A. Bray, L.C.C.

THAT the spirit of patriotism is dying
need excite little surprise ; that it
still lingers here and there, haunting like
some disconsolate ghost the scene of its
former triumphs, is the standing wonder of
the age. But these remote and belated
regions are no real exceptions to the general
truth, that the supreme aim of modern
civilization is the destruction of the old-
world patriotism as an unsaleable and an
uncommercial product. National sentiment
does indeed exist in portions of Scotland
and Ireland; but it survives only because
the bogs and the mountains offer an im-
passable obstacle to the march of the
capitalist army, and present little or no
attraction, except the sport they provide,
to the cosmopolitan millionaire.

Now there are men who have watched
with regret the disappearance of the com-
plex emotions that the name of England
once aroused. In spite of ridicule and
contumely, they continue to believe in
the value of a patriotism which, though it
200

PATRIOTISM AND EDUCATION 201

mined no gold and floated no companies,
yet nourished a people proud, reserved, and
self-reliant, a people who gloried in the
thought that their own freedom was the
sign and pledge of the freedom of the world.
In these latter days of decay such dreamers
will naturally wonder whether this national
spirit can be called back to life — in other
words, whether patriotism can be taught to
the younger generation.

The teaching of patriotism ! The very
thought would have appeared supremely
ridiculous a few generations ago. Men
would have as soon proposed to teach a
child to draw his breath or eat his food.
People in those days did not learn to be
patriots — they were patriots ; what the
breath of life is to the body, that the love
of country was to the nation. Yet, ludi-
crous as the idea is in itself, the events of
the last few years have shown only too
clearly the need of considering with all
earnestness how the love of country, now
divorced in favour of the wastrel brood of
imperialism may be restored to its old and
strenuous vigour.

If success reward this attempt, it will not
be found by appealing to the grown man,
whose heart age has long since rendered
incapable of a single throb of patriotism.
The hope lies with the children. We are

S02 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

born into the world endowed with all
manner of undeveloped instincts and un-
formed emotions. As years roll on, some
of these die of inanition, while others are
nourished into vigorous life. The part of
education is not to create, but to select and
cultivate a few of these many possible feel-
ings. Such an one is the love of country.
In the struggle of nation with nation the
presence of a spirit, that drove men to put
country first and life second, alone secured
the independence of the people. Primitive
instincts, that once determined the existence
of a species, survive long. It is not there-
fore unreasonable to suppose that a love of
country belongs to the heritage of a child.
But instincts, which find no field for exercise
in the life of the individual, soon cease to be
felt and disappear. Education must there-
fore foster and encourage this instinctive
patriotism while it is yet alive. There is no
talk here of putting into him a new spirit, or
of, so to say, inoculating him with a kind of
patriotic lymph. The sole hope lies in the
existence of the spirit, and the sole road of
success in the development of that some-
thing in the child which is tuned to beat in
sympathy with the throb of his country's
life.

The word 'teaching' suggests the thought
of schools. Nearly every child attends a

PATRIOTISM AND EDUCATION 203

school ; the first question must therefore
relate to the nature of the patriotic training,
if any, to be found in such places. The
schools divide themselves broadly into two
classes — the public boarding schools and
the elementary day schools. As there is
little resemblance between the two, they
are best treated apart.

The public schools apparently possess
unequalled opportunities for the encourage-
ment of patriotism. All the elements needed
to fan that spirit into vigorous flame are
there. They have the elements of antiquity,
of continuity, and of greatness. Their his-
tory runs far back through the centuries of
the past ; recorded in their annals and
carved on their walls are the names of
famous men of long ago — soldiers who have
laid down their lives at their country's call ;
politicians who have toiled to bestow the
boon of free institutions on their land ;
authors who have added to the glories
of a noble literature their own imperishable
works ; divines transfigured by their holi-
ness, and crowned, it may be, with the
martyr's crown — men such as these, each
school can boast, have spent their boyhood
within its walls.

Further, the element of corporate feeling
and corporate pride is strongly marked.
The boys are conscious that the school is

^04 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS^ CLUB

their own, that its honour is in their hands,
that the act of each is the act of all, and the
duty of all is to allow no stain to rest on an
untarnished name.

Finally, there is the mystical and un-
reasoning sentiment that clusters round
ivy-clad buildings and clings to old name-
carved wall?.

If it were a man's object to prepare a soil
adapted for the cultivation of national feel-
ing, it is hard to say how he could have
prepared a better. Unfortunately, as will
soon appear, these bright hopes bear no
fruit. It is not the material that is at
fault ; it is the cultivators that have gone
astray.

Take the element of famous men. They
are for the most part forgotten or regarded
as 'dull dogs/ associated with the tedium
of historical lessons, and are in no sense the
heroes who captivate the imagination of the
modern public school. True, once a year
the anniversary of the school's foundation
is celebrated; but the day is considered a
wearisome institution, only redeemed by
the fact that, with the exception of a
religious service, there is no attempt at
definite instruction. In the chapel, indeed,
there is a talk of praising famous men ; and
a long line of meaningless names is read out
in a monotonous voice to unlistening ears.

PATRIOTISM AND EDUCATION 205

But the whole ceremony is looked on in the
light of a penance to be endured, before the
holiday can be enjoyed.

Take next the sentiment of corporate
feeling and corporate pride. This requires
an object, and the discovery of the object
is an easy task. The boys have no
reverence for the man who has served his
country well and honourably ; they feel no
pride in the thought that among the old
members of the school are those who have
laid down their lives in the cause of liberty ;
these are not their heroes. The real hero
is the boy who has won a school cricket
match or stroked a crew to victory ; while
a warm glow of enthusiasm is stirred by
the memory that among the old boys are
men who have scored a century on a
crumbling wicket in a county contest,
captained a team against Australia, or won
their laurels in international football. All
the strong school sentiment is associated
with athletics, while such an insignificant
nonentity as a country is wholly forgotten
in the enthralling interests of the other.
The Great Duke once remarked that the
battle-field of Waterloo was won in the
playing-fields of Eton. The schools, put-
ting too literal an interpretation on his
w^ords, believe that, if only victories can be
gained at Lords or Henley there is no need

206 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

for further exertion. The fact that the boys
take part in the games and do not spend
all their energy in vapid sporting talk, as
happens in the common forms of athleticism,
may at least be accounted to them for virtue.

It is now clear that the public schools,
so far from encouraging patriotism, form in
all probability the strongest existing obstacle
to its development. They are not only
indifferent to the claims of country, but
have also misdirected the rich stores of
corporate feeling they possess — the very
elemental material of patriotism — till the
whole life circles round the inane vagaries
of a propelled ball or the grotesque activity
of a racing crew. Nothing more will be
said of the public schools. They offer little
hope of reform, and stand out as the most
signal and the most melancholy example of
the wastage of a great privilege and a price-
less opportunity.

Turning to the elementary day schools,
the outlook appears but little brighter. They
possess no treasures of antiquity and old
associations, public spirit hardly exists, and
the material for its culture is not promising.
The subjects selected for instruction are
not calculated to foster a love of country.
The history of England is frequently ex-
cluded, and hours devoted to the analysis
of unintelligible sentences, to the mispro-

PATRIOTISM AND EDUCATION 207

nunciation of a few French words, or to
the invigorating sciences of cookery and
laundry, are regarded as time more profit-
ably spent. Closer inquiry, however, renders
the prospect less gloomy. The London
School Board recently made history a com-
pulsory subject, thereby insuring that the
children shall at least learn that England is
a country with a past, and not, as all visible
evidence goes to prove, a project of yester-
day, organized by a combined trust.
The teachers, moreover, have grasped the
novel idea that schools are places where
instruction ought to be given ; they pay
some attention to the character of their
pupils, and are not carried away by the
superstition that the * be all ' and ' end all '
of life are to play sport or to talk sport.
Again, more amazing still, they are anxious
for their pupils to consider themselves
Englishmen. In some schools we may
watch the pathetic sight of children of
Russian or German Jews learning to speak,
in almost unintelligible accents, of England
as their country.

In the instruction given there is naturally
much wanting, and much that should be
omitted. The bombast and swagger of a
bastard patriotism are only too visibly
manifest. Children are taught that the
sun never sets on the King's dominions,

PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS^ CLUB

leaving unnoted the sights this omnipresent
luminary surveys on his daily journey. A
short time back, when the war fever was
high, certain melancholy spectacles might be
observed in many of the schools. A kind
of game or recreation, a sort of playing at
patriots, was introduced at frequent inter-
vals. The boys were assembled in the
school-hall, and told stories of how an
irresistible force had succeeded in winning
a glorious victory over a handful of ignorant
peasants. At the conclusion the boys would
sing with much vigour the latest of popular
songs, fresh from the pen of one of the
bloodier-minded of the minor poets. After
this sublime thanksgiving service, the school
would be dismissed to play ' Boers and
English ' in the playground, or score carica-
tures of Kruger on a convenient wall. Scenes
of this kind do not make for edification.

If ever a nation have so far fallen from its
high estate as no longer to deserve that name ;
if it merit loss of its most precious treasures,
its flag, and its independence — conceivably
such a case may occur — then let the work
of destruction be done quietly and w^ithout
ostentation. We do not think it right to
surround the scaffold of a murderer with a
throng of children, or to dilate on the loftiness
of the gibbet, the strength of the rope, and
the skill of the executioner. We pass over

PATRIOTISM AND EDUCATION 209

the tragedy in solemn silence. Let us do
the same with a nation that has sinned the
sin that admits of no repentance. Let us
execute judgment as men performing a
painful duty ; let us draw down the blinds,
that no view of the mournful j^ageant strike
on our children's eyes, lest they learn to
glory that the strong are stronger than the
weak. That this spirit of flamboyant
jubilation over a gallant foe should have
invaded the schools and infected the teachers,
while a matter for regret, need excite no
surprise. It is a plague that has run riot
throughout the country, working every-
where destruction.

There are not in the elementary schools
those symptoms of senile ineptitude and
that wastage of golden opportunities which
branded the public schools. There is, on
the contrary, much that is hopeful. Efforts,
quaint and distorted, it is true, are made to
impress on the children the fact that they
have a country, and a duty to that country.
The teachers eagerly welcome new ideas ;
they have no cloistered love of present
methods ; they are wedded to no idle
superstition about the traditions of an
imaginary and fictitious past, and adopt
with pleasure any course likely to make
for greater efficiency. It is natural, there-
fore, to expect that, were they to grasp the

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210 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

true significance of patriotism, they would
not be slow to make patriots of their pupils.

Now, patriotism is the love of a thing
vast, shadowy, and undefined. There is
X^/ nothing that takes concrete shape and, in

visible form, says to us, *I am your country,
love me.' Before this vague sentiment can
be developed, men must have first learned
to lavish their aff*ection on some less abstract
an object. The love of the few must pre-
cede the love of the many, and the love of
the many, in spite of all the protestations
of the Tolstoyans, is not acquired by culti-
vating a genial indifi'erence to the indi-
vidual. Now, the smallest unit round
which clusters a spontaneous aff'ection is
the family. The family supplies men with
a country in miniature, possessing its own
interests, ties, and duties, and provides a
tiny world where the life of each is indis-
solubly connected with the life of all — it is,
as Mazzini says, the heart's fatherland.
Family love, then, is the raw material of
patriotism. Fortunately for England, it at
present retains both health and vigour.

But the journey from the narrow circle
of family to the wide expanse of country is
long and arduous. Some bridge between
the two, making the passage easier and the
transition less abrupt, must be discovered.
From the members of one family there is a

PATRIOTISM AND EDUCATION 211

natural path that leads to the neighbouring
families. The interests of all are closely
associated, and family affection ought to
expand easily into love of native village.
Local feeling and local pride mark, there-
fore, a further stage in the embryonic
development of patriotism.

Now, in the old days, when patriots still
existed, a strange passionate affection en-
circled every village. A man's place of
birth was to him something sacred — its very
ground was charged with a significance
such as belonged to no other spot. This
devotion to the home of his ancestors, the
mysterious elemental love of the very soil,
drew for its strength on the rich treasures
of childish associations. Men loved each
field because they had played in it as
little children, and each wood because they
had gathered flowers there in the days of
long ago ; while the village and the village
green were ringed with a halo of romance,
as the common assembly ground where the
annual fair was held, the old games played,
and the old festivals celebrated. From
such threads were woven that unreasoning
love of some small spot which seemed to
those who dwelt therein the fairest region
under heaven, and the very centre of the
universe.

Hence it came that the inhabitants of

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212 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

Slowcombe-on-the-Marslies would glory in
their fenland, which was flatter by far than
all the range of the Alps and the Apennines,
and would pride themselves on the weird
desolation of their pools and bogs, with
which London Bridge and the City could
offer no comparison. This sentiment it
was that made the very thought of a foreign
invader appear as sacrilege, and drove them
to lay their all on the altar of their country's
independence.

Now, however passionate might be the
love of the inhabitants of Slowcombe-on-
the-Marshes for their own barren, inhospit-
able soil, and however unreasoning might
appear the affection that Brampton-in-
the-Vale lavished on its rich grazing-
meadows, they would at least admit that
such devotion, if not praiseworthy, was at
any rate natural. Between the two spots
there would certainly exist a feeling of
sympathy and respect. More than this,
Slowcombe-on-the-Marshes would feel that
its seclusion, and Brampton-in-the-Vale
that its wealth, was assured and safeguarded
because the two had often linked themselves
together for mutual self-protection. The very
fact that the soil was their own was due to
the union of all the Slowcombes and the
Bramptons — in other words, to the country.
Without such co-operation their social life

'^Mr

PATRIOTISM AND EDUCATION 213

and independence had long since disappeared.
Thus, a man^s love of his native place
naturally widened and transformed itself
into love of his country — that larger power
which maintained alike the freedom of all,
and permitted the dweller in Slowcombe, if
he so pleased, to drag out unhindered his
emaciated and poverty-stricken existence,
and allowed the inhabitant of Brampton, if
such his desire, to wax fat on the fruits of , , -
the land. ^•'^^

Clearly, then, the first essential in the
teaching of patriotism is such training as
will knit the life of the child closely to his
native place, and provide those rich stores
of happy memories which will ring round
his village with the magic circle of love
and sanctity. But the word 'village' raises
a serious difficulty. In speaking of villages
the assumption has apparently been made
that England is still a country of small
hamlets. Unfortunately, this is false.
Rural life is waning ; villages show little
signs of growth — happy are they if they
maintain their size — and the more energetic
of the country breed pass away, and are
engulfed by the towns. There is no
intention here of denying this melancholy
truth — indeed, the decline of patriotism
may largely be explained by this decay of
rural life. But the question that presses

214 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

for an answer is whether or no there is any
hope of reviving, if not the old conditions,
at any rate the feelings and sentiment once
associated with the name of England. The
problem of the town is different from the
problem of the village, though not so
different as would at first appear. If a
solution can be found for the village, this
will go far to remove the chief difficulties
presented by the intricate organization of a
town.

As regards the villages, it must be at
once admitted that the old communal inter-
course of the inhabitants has disappeared.
Gone are the old games and the old customs ;
vanished from the green are the sports and
the festivals ; sunk into oblivion are the
Morris-dancers and the revels of May-day.
In a few secluded corners fragments of the
old life survive, leading a melancholy exist-
ence of decline and decay. Here a handful
of children may be found performing one of
the ancient ' singing games,' there a gang
of noisy lads will drag about a May-pole to
extract unwilling halfpence, while occasion-
ally a few parish officials will in solitary
state beat the bounds of the parish. These
customs have died out, but there is no
reason why they may not be revived. They
died out when commercialism first began
to invade England. Men's eagerness to

PATRIOTISM AND EDUCATION 215

grow rich left them no leisure to play
games ; their thirst for gold would not
permit the children to remain children, but
drove them to the agricultural gangs, to the
mines, to the factories. Small wonder that
these children forgot to dance and sing.
At the present time this hindrance exists
no longer ; grudgingly, and of necessity,
childhood is allowed to the nation as an
expensive luxury. The cause of their dis-
appearance being removed, the only question
is whether these games and customs have
lost their charm. Now, all evidence goes
to show that this is not the case. Where-
ever people have tried to revive them,
success has rewarded the attempt. They
retain their attraction, and need but a
sustained effort to be restored to their former
place in the village life. Indeed, it would
be strange if this were not the case. Human
nature is unchanged, and children, now as
ever, delight in acting out the doings of
their elders. The old * singing games ' are
but so many comedies and tragedies that
celebrate the perennial interests of man's
life.

In spite of all modern progress certain
customs linger on. As long as this is true
the games derived from these ancient relics
of barbarism will never lose their fascina-
tion. In spite of divorce laws men marry,

216 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

and women are given in marriage. Why,
then, should the children not learn to play

* Three dukes ' and * Round and round the
village/ or once again, * Come up the green
grass 7 In spite of certain Socialists
T^omen yet bear children, and family life
grows strong. Surely, then, ^ Jenny sits
a- weeping,' ' When I was a young girl,' and

* Sally Water ' will not have lost all power
to attract. Even the agnostic knows that
we die and funerals may yet be seen. It
may therefore without undue confidence be
affirmed that a charm will surround the
funeral games, and children delight to bury
' The Booman,' to lament over * Jenny
Jones,' or even to find a secret joy in
' Wallflowers.'

Now, besides these games, solemn festi-
vals marking the progress of the year
were wont to be celebrated, as, for example,
the Midsummer Vigil, the feasts of Sheep -
shearing and of Harvest Home, each
distinguished by appropriate ceremonies.
Above all were the May-day revels. Then
the May-pole was cut in the woods, and
drawn, gay with boughs and flowers, to
the village green by teams of brightly-
caparisoned white horses. There, in the
centre, it was planted, soon to be surrounded
by all the gala company of Morris-dancers,
milkmaids, shepherdesses, and their Sove-

PATRIOTISM AND EDUCATION 217

reign, the Queen of May. There through
the long summer days it was left, the
common centre for games and dancing and
innocent merriment.

Can anyone deny that this pageant would
fail to awaken interest now ? The militant
orgies of the past two years, and the
throngs that flocked to view the Jubilee
processions, all testify that the old delight
of the English in spectacular effects is as
strong as ever ; while in villages the im-
mense pecuniary success attending the so-
called annual fairs, that make night hideous
and day ghastly with the shriek of the
steam- whistle and the discordant blare of
the steam-roundabout, is at least a proof that
there is a keen demand for this dismal form
of amusement. It is not, perhaps, ex-
travagant to hope that the May games and
the May -pole will be able to oust the steam-
whistle and its unsavoury crew.

Now, many of the old ceremonies pos-
sessed a deeper significance for the country.
Sports such as tilting and quarterstaff,
wrestling and archery, were encouraged to
train the youth in manly exercise, and fit
them, if need arose, to defend their land.
Something analogous to this might well be
instituted, with the changes necessary to
the march of time. Corps of boys could
give military displays, compete in mimic

218 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

rifle contests, and see the winner crowned
by the Queen of May. Even the most con-
firmed advocate of the new order of things
will admit that this soupqon of the military
will stir joyful enthusiasm in every heart.

Here, then, are rounds of games and
pageants that admit of easy revival. What
can be expected of this revival ? At least
the memories of childhood will be happier
and more closely associated with the life of
the village. Further, there is good cause to
hope for a reanimation of the old spirit
that once inspired the hamlets of England.
There are certain characteristics that mark
these games and festivals, leaving the stamp
of their influence on those who take part in
them. They are closely connected with the
most solemn events of human existence —
marriage, childbirth, and death. They are
related to the home and work of the village
and the slow passage of the year. One and
all they are social amusements, signs of
corporate life, and a proof of a common
brotherhood. In other words, they show
the distinctive traits of the English yeoman,
seen in his homely doings and his love of his
native place. Compare these peculiarities
with the striking features presented by the
most typical of modern village institutions
— the village fair and steam roundabout.
Its invariable accompaniments are the wild

PATRIOTISM AND EDUCATION 219

insensate noise, the mad career of people
tossed up and down and whirled round and
round till they can no longer stand for
giddiness, and the meaningless shout of an
inarticulate mob. The former displays the
characteristics of patriotism, the latter of
imperialism; the May-pole stands as the
symbol of the one, the steam- whistle of the
other. The choice lies between the May-
pole and the steam- whistle-
Doubtless two objections have already
suggested themselves to the ingenious
reader. He w^ill remark that the spirit of
the May-pole is dead, and its place filled
by the spirit of the steam-whistle. He will
proceed to urge that the attempt to revive
the former by reviving the customs which
were its expression is as senseless a pro-
ceeding as the endeavour to improve a dog's
temper by persistently wagging his tail.

This argument rests on the quite erroneous
assumption that the nature of our amuse-
ments is merely a sign of character, and
has no connection with its formation.
Unquestionably brutal men attend prize-
fights, and a drunkard frequents the public-
house, but it is equally true that visits to
such places make for brutality and intem-
perance. As a matter of fact, the nature of
our amusements is at once the cause and
the effect of our disposition. The really

2S0 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

important question, on which all turns, is
whether or no the particular practice has
power to amuse. If this power has gone, then
no doubt the accompanying spirit is dead.
It would, for example, be wasted labour to
exhort men to return to the spirit, which
animated the ancient Britons, by painting
themselves blue. Could men take pleasure
in this form of decoration, then there need
be no hesitation in asserting that the happy
mood of our savage ancestors admits of
being called back to life. Unfortunately,
the sartorial authority wielded by the tailor
and the milliner is too strong to allow any
hope of men finding even a secret joy in so
elemental and inexpensive a form of covering.
Now, as has already been shown, the May-
pole and its games have not lost their
fascination — they still appeal to the child.
There is therefore cause to believe that the
May- pole spii-it, so far from being dead, is
merely in a state of suspended animation.
There is no thought here of creating a spirit
that does not exist. Reasons have been
given for the belief that the instinctive love
of native place still dwells in the heart of
the child. All the proposals made merely
aim at reproducing the conditions which
favour and strengthen that affection, and
so prevent it dying from lack of nourish-
ment.

PATRIOTISM AND EDUCATION 221

Another comment that will doubtless be
made relates to the apparent inconsistency
shown by the advocacy of games here and
the denunciation of athleticism found in
an earlier portion of the essay. This arises
from a misunderstanding. It is not the
playing of games that is condemned, but
athleticism. Now, athleticism is a phase
of imperialism, the spirit animating men
who toil not but pay others to toil, who
surround their brow with laurels they
have not themselves won, and imagine that
vociferous pride in the achievements of
others lends a lustre to their own in-
effective existence. The playing of games,
like patriotism, has a different spirit — the
spirit of men who talk little and do much,
whose pride, if such there be, is the pride of
fellow-workers in a comrade who has won
the prize for which all have laboured.

From the love of his native village the
child will pass easily to the love of country.
This one spot will be to him as Kelmscott
was to William Morris. ' It has come to
be to me,' he writes, ' the type of the
pleasant places of the earth . . . and as
others love the race of men through their
lovers or their children, so I love the earth
through that small space of it.'

The problem of the town will be solved
by following methods similar to those

222 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

advocated for the village. It must, how-
ever, be confessed that to rouse local feeling
in a town is a task of no little difficulty.
The idea that a man should be proud of
being one among CamberwelFs quarter of
a million inhabitants, that he should go
so far as to wonder whether the grim
dulness of Camberwell is grimmer than the
atmosphere which stimulates Bermondsey,
that he should unite with other Camber-
wellians to do anything except, perhaps,
trample down a few Pro-Boers on Peckham
Rye — any such idea as this could only
emanate from Camberwell House Lunatic
Asylum. Yet at least some attempt
should be made to teach the children that
there is such a place as Camberwell, if it were
only to make known to them the existence
of a Mayor and Council. Why should not
the Mayor and Council, arrayed in gorgeous
robes, parade the streets on certain days of
the year 1 Or why, again, should not the
Guardians march through the district,
followed by all the old people in receipt of
out-relief? Pageants of this kind — they
were held in the towns formerly — would
not fail to take hold on the imagination of
the young. Yet some smaller unit would
be better adapted to win the affections of
the child. To urge him to love Camber-
well is rather like exhorting him to enter

PATRIOTISM AND EDUCATION 223

into amorous relations with the Atlantic
Ocean. Undoubtedly the contemplation of
any vast object, such as the world of living
creatures, may excite vague indefinable
emotions, but affords no stimulating motive
for effective action. It encourages indul-
gence in an idle sentimentalism that leaves
a man with a consciousness of virtue, but
without that sense of effort which alone
makes virtue virtuous.

The peculiar difficulty attending the
encouragement of patriotism among the
children of a town becomes now apparent.
An effective patriotism, as distinguished
from empty emotionalism, can only be
reached by passing over a series of stepping-
stones that start from some small spot
where love spontaneously issues in action.
In country districts there is the village to
bridge the gap between family and country.
In urban neighbourhoods the town is too
vast an object to captivate the affections
of the child. There is need of some smaller
unit that shall in cities take the place of
the village green. The elementary schools
suggest themselves as a possible substitute.
The school play-ground and the school hall
must in towns be made the centre of the
child's life. Here the old games and sports
will be revived, and experience proves that
they admit of revival even here, while

224 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

school pride and corporate feeling will be
encouraged. The schools will become asso-
ciated with days of happiness and will
gather round them a rich store of memories
to remain when childhood is over. Further
than this, the schools must not be left
forlorn and isolated spots in the neighbour-
hood. They must be closely linked to
some organization. Among a religious
people like the Irish, the Church would
supply this want. In England such a pro-
posal may appear ludicrous, but there is no
other alternative. The Church at least
possesses the elements of permanence and
continuity. It is at present widely divorced
from the life of the nation, but there is
little doubt that if it woke to the full sense
of its privileges and its responsibility — that
is, if it became a National Church instead of
one as by law established — this estrange-
ment would end. It would then concentrate
its work on the schools, and no longer con-
sider children a safety-valve for discharging
without danger the energies of the youngest
and most inefficient curate.

Two steps have now been made on the
way towards patriotism. The road has led
from the individual to the family, from
the family to some small spot, whether
village green or school ; the path must now
be continued till it reach the country. The

PATRIOTISM AND EDUCATION 225

relation of the native place to the country
is not clear of itself. Elementary educa-
tion must establish this connection. This
end can be promoted by the adoption
of three methods of training. The first
depends on the actual subjects taught in
the school, the second on a system of
excursions that will give reality to their
lessons, and the third on forms and cere-
monies chosen to render this instruction
impressive.

History appears the natural subject to
teach the child his relation to his country.
Many schools, however, do not teach this
subject, and many others teach it very
inefficiently. There are various reasons
for this neglect ; most of them are due to
the eccentricities of inspectors and the
vague, discursive minds of examiners.
Teachers fight shy of the subject, as the
children, when put to the test, often fail
to do themselves justice. The subject is
so vast, and the ways of inspectors so
capricious, that it is impossible to tell the
line of inquiry one may elect to pursue. He
may have an afi^ection for monarchs, and
exhibit curiosity about the claims of the
early Kings to the throne of France, or the
intricate matrimonial complications of an
amateur Bluebeard. He may have a taste
for detail, and seek to discover when tea

15

PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

was first introduced, to which eye Nelson
applied his telescope, or on what day the
Magna Carta was signed. On the other
hand, he may display a love of narrative,
and devote his time to the elucidation of
such problems as what William the Con-
queror said when his horse trod on a red-
hot cinder, or who did what when a Queen
desired to cross a muddy road. Now, the
difficulty of fortifying children to resist so
varied an attack is serious, and there is
little cause for wonder that teachers avoid
this lumber-room of old rubbish that goes
by the name of history. All these subtle
interrogatories have no more connection
with patriotism than the order of the Kings
of Judah or Jonah's submarine voyage have
with religion.

The Germans' love of their fatherland is
famous ; it owes much of its strength to the
careful teaching the children receive in the
schools. Their methods need but a few
obvious changes to adopt them for use in
this land. The lessons ought to be com-
menced early, even in the infant depart-
ment. Here the children will wander
happily in the legendary country of King
Arthur, Robin Hood, and other romantic
heroes. The reading-books, instead of deal-
ing with such problems as how the cat
caught the mouse, or how disobedient

PATRIOTISM AND EDUCATION 227

Tommy fell in the pond, will tell how
St. George slew the dragon and King
Alfred burned the cakes. In this way the
child's first idea of his country will come
to him wrapt in the wonder-colours of the
land of far away, and invested with the
matchless charm that belongs to the fairies'
dwelling-place.

In the senior departments history will be
taught chronologically in large unbroken
periods. The children will learn how the
Saxons won England for their country,
how for awhile there were fierce struggles
with foes from without, and how, finally,
the union of all the yeomen that came from
the villages secured them their indepen-
dence. Omitting, for the most part, all
reference to Court intrigue, they will be
taught that the later history turns on the
battle for freedom waged against tyranny
from within, and is the tale of a nation
working out its own salvation. It is these
common people with their homely habits,
their reserved manners, and their stubborn
resolution, whom they will grow to love.

Now, unless certain guiding principles are
borne in mind, history degenerates into idle
gossip and fable on the one hand, and the
arid bones of disconnected fact on the
other. First and foremost the children
must hear that the country of which they are

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PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

learning has now become their own ; that
its future rests on the present, and that
the present is theirs to make or mar ; that
the present has grown from out a past, the
slow creation of men of former time, who
have given their lives, without thought of
reward and often without hope of success,
because England asked of them this sacri-
fice. Next, it is very necessary that they
' should know that the word 'country' cannot
■ be used to cloak a crime, and that sin does
not become virtuous when identified with
the expressed will of a nation. They will
have impressed upon them the truth that in
its thousand-year-old existence the country
has oft sojourned in the wilderness of error,
and wandered many a weary league along
the road that leadeth to destruction, paying
the penalty of the sin to the uttermost.
Finally, the pages of history must teach
u that each nation has a country of its own,

and enforce the lesson that the noblest duty
of a people is to insure to all this privilege,
and not to rob them of the treasure.

In this common-sense method of teaching
history a close connection will be estab-
lished between this and other subjects. As
reading - books for the upper standards,
selections will be made from the writings
of the authors who belong to the period
studied. For recitations and for songs the

PATRIOTISM AND EDUCATION

old ballads and the old tunes will take the

Elace of the lays of the minor poets. If
istory be taught in this way the word
* country ' will, in the mind of the child,
stand for a closely connected group of ideas,
appealing at once to the understanding and
the imagination, and be to some extent
coloured by sentiment.

Further, the history of his native place,
appealing as it does to the personal experi-
ence of the child, must be connected with
the general history of the country. There
is hardly any village or town which is not
associated with some great person or some
noteworthy event. in this respect the
towns possess an advantage over the rural
districts. London is here pre-eminent; the
evils of its cumbrous and disjointed vast-
ness find some compensation in the part it
has played in England's story. The City,
the town, the bridges, and the names of the
old streets, all alike call up memories from
the dead past and make it live. But whether
in London or elsewhere, local history must
be taught, and excursions made to view
places of interest in the neighbourhood.
The tale of their land will for the children
become instinct with charm, life, and reality,
and no longer be regarded as a dreary apology
for a story-book.

Finally, there is a mystical element in

230 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

patriotism. A country is not a mere name
for a number of isolated warehouses supply-
ing bread-and-butter, nor a sort of universal
provider of joys and pleasures ; it possesses
an individual existence. That life is longer,
stronger, wider than our own, and leads to
some end we either hinder or promote, but
cannot foresee. It claims our service and
our love as a right that needs no justifica-
tion and with a strength that bears no
resistance. We do not love our land be-
cause it gives us prosperity — wealth, happi-
ness, and the like are but flowers we pluck
on the journey; we are prosperous because
our love is true. Or it may be we are in
evil plight because cur love has gone astray,
and fastened on some ill-featured wench
whose masquerading wiles have deceived
us. Its mighty claims, its ever-perennial
life, and its march toward a far distant and
unknown goal, robe a country in a garb of
holiness, meet to stir awe and reverence.
All objects for which men sacrifice their
lives are sacred. They may, indeed, spend
their lives in amassing wealth, but they do
not give their lives to win it. They offer a
life for a life, a life for their faith, a life of
their country. Life, religion, and country
belong, therefore,, to those ideas termed
sacred or mystical. All alike instinctively
appeal to the child, and find an echo in his

PATRIOTISM AND EDUCATION 231

heart. The final task of the schools is to
wake that echo and make it permanent.

When we are dealing with sacred things
we need some symbol that shall stand for
the object of our veneration and make
vivid appeal to the senses. The flag is the
natural symbol of a country. At the pre-
sent time the Union Jack is supplied to
many schools, and hangs idly flapping over
the best attending class. This must be
changed; if we treat the country or its
symbol with indifference, we can hardly
expect children to pay it reverence. The
flag ought to be produced only on rare
occasions, and then accompanied with
solemn ceremony worthy of an emblem for
which men have died. It would probably
be wise to substitute for the Union Jack
the less known and less vulgarized banner
of St. George.

In the school year certain days must be
set apart as days of national thanksgiving.
At such seasons processions, with appro-
priate songs and pageant, will be held in
honour of some great event or famous man.
In other words, what is required is a kind
of ritualistic patriotism. There will be
placed in the infant school, near some
darkened corner, a cupboard associated
with the name of country. Out of this
cupboard on the festival days will be

PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

brought, in the presence of all, things bright
and glittering and appealing to the senses —
emblems of days of long ago ; while in the
senior departments something analogous to
the old religious plays will be instituted.
Historical scenes will be acted out by the
children clad in the proper costumes, some
of the old ballads sung and the old games
played. In selecting the men most worthy
of admiration it will be best, in times like
the present, not to choose men who have
swept through the universe in a whirl of
triumphant progress, but to prefer those who
have engaged in an apparently hopeless
struggle, and faced the issue with that
spirit of resistant resignation which trans-
cends all despair, and awaits with serene
confidence the vindication which the future
will bring.

Here, then, in rough outline, is a method
for the teaching of patriotism. Starting
with the family, it has been shown how
family affection may be transformed into a
love of native place. Next, passing be-
yond the village, an attempt has been made
to explain how the passionate love of some
one spot can be widened till it embraces the
country. There will be no difficulty in
describing how patriotism can expand into
the nobler form of imperialism, which
stands unpolluted by the bestial materialism

PATRIOTISM AND EDUCATION 233

clinging to most of its manifestations ; or
how, in turn, imperialism may grow into
the love of humanity. The process is ever
the same ; the love of the few must precede
the love of the many. To pervert a parable,
it is only from the well-plenished board of a
rich family love that Dives has any crumbs
of affection to spare for the poor beggar
Humanity sitting outside on his doorstep.

If some such training as that advocated
be established, the children will at least be
taught that they have a country — a sacred
thing to which they owe their love. They
will learn that this love of country, or
patriotism, is a passion for the land in which
they dwell ; the land for which their fore-
fathers toiled and bled ; the land which, as
its latest-born inheritors, they must one day
hand down to their children, glorified with
the halo of holy deeds and untarnished by
a single act of shame.

PATRIOTISM AND THE CHRISTIAN
FAITH

A

By the Bbv. Conrad Noel

RELIGION to have endurance must
build upon instinct. Many people
think otherwise. In their view the func-
tion of religion is an attack on nature,
using for weapon that graceless artificiality
they miscall grace. If these people be in
the right, such natural and fundamental
instincts as sex, friendship, love of chil-
dren or of parents, as well as that instinc-
tive love of country which in the following
pages I am prepared to defend, would at all
times be found in passionate conflict with
Christianity. That this is a contention
often put forward is, of course, a well-known
fact, but that anything but the merest sur-
face view of our religion lends colour to it
I most emphatically deny.

No doubt you may find an opposition
between nature and grace in the Bible.
You can always find anything you like in
the Bible. I have never come across any
theory or doctrine not to be found therein
234

PATRIOTISM AND CHRISTIAN FAITH 235

or proved thereby. There is equally little
doubt that the sacred writers thought to a
large extent in terms of this opposition; but
to admit this is far from admitting it to be
any essential note of the Christian faith.
When the practical moralist distinguishes
between nature and grace, admirable as
such a distinction may be for everyday
ethics, we must be on our guard against
supposing it any less fictitious than the
lines of latitude and longitude we draw
across our maps. It would be worth while
to try and accustom ourselves to think of
grace as infinitely more natural to full-
grown man than the ape and tiger instincts
of his youth, for it is the same * will to live '
that produces the desires of * the flesh ' and
of * the spirit.' A close parallel might,
indeed, be drawn between the animal world,
including primitive man (the superior
animal in craft and cunning), in its struggle
for life physically understood, and that
later struggle for a subtler, deeper life, the
life eternal, which is the untiring object of
the God -man that is to be and even now is.
However this may be, the great religion has
always appeared among us as revelation.
It has never sought to graft some brand-
new ethical system on to an alien world.
Its business has been with a concealed or
forgotten but existing order of things, the

236 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS^ CLUB

ignoring of which has spelt damnation.
Religion, to adopt an excellent piece of
current slang, is an eye-opener. It brings
men out of darkness into light. It finds
men worshipping at an altar to an unknown
God, dimly perceived as life, and proclaims :
* Whom ye ignorantly worship, Him declare
I unto you. This life for which you
struggle, I declare to you its essential
character. It does not consist in abund-
ance of things possessed. Its attainment
does not involve the ruthless trampling down
of competitors, but rather the perception of
37our union with God and one another, of
the identity of interests communal and
interests individual. By revealing all this,
I am not come to destroy the life you set
so much store by, but to fulfil it. I declare
unto you the life which is eternal.'

Well, then, the religion that has hold
upon the future must be anchored in the
essentially human, must believe in man,
must be ready to * distil a food from a
poison.' To it no impulse, however vicious
its present output, is fundamentally evil,
but rather a healthy desire, blinded and
misled, that cries with Bartimaeus, ' Lord,
that I may receive my sight.' In a word,
the great religion inscribes upon its banners,
* I am come not to destroy but to fulfil.'

Now, when we begin examining the
Christianity of our day, we find two main

PATRIOTISM AND CHRISTIAN FAITH 237

tendencies — one practical, the other philo-
sophical — opposed to this conception of
religion. The Roman Church in practice
must be regarded as inimical to the concep-
tion, in so far as her present policy does
actually result in the loosening of existing
ties, the weakening of local patriotisms and
distinctions, and the obliteration of natural
boundaries of countries. I do not say that
the Western idea of authority is in theory
irreconcilable with the above definition of
religion (whatever one's fears may be, it
would argue a far greater knowledge of
Roman philosophy than I possess, or an
impudent dogmatism which I hope I am
without, to pronounce upon the point), but
in practice it has to a very great extent
discouraged it. One might point out, by
the way, that if the kind of Imperialism
advocated in our country by the Fabian
Society, which is more and more becoming
the power behind Parliaments, should
dominate the political world, it would
present a very close parallel to the imme-
diate policies of the Roman Communion.

There is in both the same curious con-
fusion of thought between unity and its
deadly parody, uniformity. But in most
striking and complete hostility to this
humanism of religion is Count Tolstoy's
interpretation of the Christian faith. Not-
withstanding its evident sincerity, its syste-

238 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

matized morality, its insistence upon a
kind of universal love, it leaves upon one's
mind an ineradicable impression of in-
humanity, of a system superimposed in
avowed opposition to the instincts of the
race — instance its warfare with sex and
w^ith nationality.

Now, there are two considerations that
should make us more than usually cautious
in our examination of his arguments,
namely, his treatment of all that have gone
before him as knaves and bunglers, and his
irresponsible handling of the sacred text.
It is difficult to treat with seriousness a
criticism which, true to its Russian origin,
with one stroke of the brush blacks out
Cana of Galilee, not even in uncritical
obedience to a priori disbelief in miracle,
but because the incident does not square
with the character of a Tolstoy an Jesus.
But Tolstoy is a Gospeller draw^n from the
ranks of the suddenly converted, and, after
the manner of his kind, he lays his colours
on thick, giving us a dark lurid picture of
his own youth, and a companion portrait
of the youth humanity. Neither, I should
imagine, are half so black as he paints
them. The temper of the suddenly saved
has occasionally given us a saint, but
seldom a critic with pure and balanced
outlook on present or past.

PATRIOTISM AND CHRISTIAN FAITH 239

He would be complacent indeed who did
not feel with Tolstoy the necessity of re-
ferring back from time to time to the
Founder of our common faith, of compar-
ing our practice with His precept, or who
did not experience something of his amaze
at the result; but when it comes to the
matter of reconstruction and reform, he
might easily feel that here the Russian
prophet leaves him in as sorry a plight as
do the defenders of things as they are.

This going back to the original Gospel
meant for Tolstoy the rediscovery of the
supreme law of love as the living force
of life, and not merely as a thing every-
body admits, which is by interpretation
a thing nobody particularly believes. It
is when we come to his interpretation of
this law that we begin to rub our eyes.
By failing to acknowledge the develop-
ment of Christian universalism from the
nationalism of Israel and the naturalism of
common loves and desires, his tinal con-
ception of world-love is twisted into a cari-
cature of that resistless passion for which,
if a man giv^e all the substance of his house,
it would utterly be contemned. The rule
for practical life now amounts to little more
than the inculcation of an outward method
unrelated to the condition of the soul
behind it, which alone can give to con-

240 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

duct significance or validity. ' Love one
another * is watered down to ' do not knock
one another about.' In grasping at the
vast shadow humanity, he comes near for-
getting the existence of men. Thus has
mankind become a bloodless and anaemic
abstraction — mankind, which is in verity the
body and blood of God.

On the appearance of White's ' History
of Selborne ' it was contended by certain
critics that the author could tell one
nothing w^orth the telling. His generaliza-
tions were neither new nor true. How
could they be, since he had not visited the
South Pacific Islands nor the forests of
Westralia ? From the narrow stage of
Selborne he dares speak as one having
authority. By ' new ' these critics under-
stand fresh tit- bits of information rather than
the output of a new^ and wondering heart,
rekindled by the Ancient of Days, who cries,
* Behold, I make all things new.' Now,
here is the answer to all criticism of this
kind. The deep insight into one little, plot
of ground by a man who has seen with
new eyes argues a better knowledge of the
universe than do stores of information of
the ' round the w^orld in eighty days '
variety. To understand the foliage of the
tropics you must needs know first the leaves
of your woods at Selborne ; and is not this

PATRIOTISM AND CHRISTIAN FAITH 241

also the rationale of patriotism ? If a man
love not Selborne, which he hath seen, how
shall he love the Cosmos which he hath
not seen ?

Count Tolstoy, missing this, comes near
missing all, for there is no climbing up
some other way into the fold of catholic
love. This way is at the same time both
path and goal ; it has within it permanently
the very nature of the fold to which it
leads. When at last you come to that
greater love, you will not love your own
Switzerland, England, Holland, Ireland,
less, but more. Tolstoy's Christ is Salvator
Mundi. So is ours ; but ours was born at
Nazareth, and was also Saviour of Israel.
We find, therefore, nothing amazing in the
fact that He never included in the list of
temptings by the devil that especial friend-
ship with St. John, nor the unresisted
longing to weep over the city which lay
so close to His heart — *0 Jerusalem, Jerusa-
lem, thou that killest the prophets, and
stonest them which are sent unto thee, how^
often would I have gathered thy children
together, even as a hen gathereth her
chickens under her wings, and ye would
not I Behold, your house is left unto you
desolate.' It should be remembered by
those who would assure us that His tears
for Babylon or London would have been

16

242 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

the same in kind and intensity that He
set a definite limit to His work by pro-
nouncing, * I am not sent but unto the
lost sheep of the House of Israel.' So
the Universal Saviour confines Himself to
His own little patch of nation, and almost
entirely to His own countrymen. Not to
destroy, but to expand Jewish nationalism
was He come, by purging out those social
vices that would make it abortive, by
widening what was narrow, by making it
inclusive where before it sought jealously
to exclude. Judaea to Him is blessed
among nations, the salt of the whole earth,
and it is as patriot He dares add : ' But if
the salt have lost his savour, wherewith
shall it be salted ? It is thenceforth good
for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be
trodden under foot of men.'

His were neither the calumnies of the
cynical cosmopolitan nor the flatteries of
the Jerusalem-right-or-wrong Pharisees, but
His the love that dared praise and worship,
and therefore dared denounce. I suppose
He was what would now be called a pro-
Gentile — that is, one who cares too deeply
for his country to stand by speechless while
her enemies are betraying her to some
money-grubbing gang of mongrel finan-
ciers. In His spirit is that challenge of
Ibsen's * Enemy of the People,' whose voice

PATRIOTISM AND CHRISTIAN FAITH 243

rings clear above the execrations of the
mob, 'I love my native town so well I
would rather ruin it than see it flourishing
upon a lie/ This is the fiery patriotism
that inspired Francis Adams when he
sang :

* England, the land I loved

W ith passionate pride ;
For hate of whom I live,
Who for love had died.

' Can I while shines the sun

That hour regain,
WTien I again may come to you
And love again 1

* No, not while that flag

Of greed and lust
Flaunts in the air untaught
To drag the dust.

' Never till expiant
I see you kneel,
And brandished gleams aloft
The foeman's steel.

* Ah ! then to speed, and laugh

As my heart caught the knife.
Mother, I love you ! here.
Here is my life.'

How vividly this recalls the stand made
long ago in Judasa against those self-
styled patriots who showed their devotion
to country in that abject betrayal of
their fellow-countryman to Rome, crying,
* We have no King but Caesar !' How

16—2

244 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

Jesus Hung out against their intolerable
self - righteousness that scathing denun-
ciation drawn from their national Scrip-
tures : ' I tell you of a truth, m3>ny
widows were in Israel in the days of Elias,
when the heaven was shut up three years
and six months, when great famine was
throughout all the land ; but unto none
of them was Elias sent, save unto Sarepta,
a city of Sidon, unto a woman that was a
widow. And many lepers were in Israel in
the time of Eliseus the prophet; but none
of them was cleansed, saving Naaman the
Syrian.'

Now all this, I am convinced, was not
the outcome of the feeling, It is easy and
pleasant to criticise my country, for am I
not a citizen of a larger world — but of an
intense and burning affection. He believed
in Israel as elect — a royal priesthood, a
people chosen, not to damn the world by
their contempt, but to save it by their faith.
This was the immemorial belief of poets
and prophets now in these last days gathered
up into the fulgent conviction of the Christ.
It was for this conviction that His country-
men would have cast Him down headlong
from the precipice on which their city was
built, and did ultimately succeed in killing
His Body — the Body that for more than
three days could not be holden of death,

PATRIOTISM AND CHRISTIAN FAITH 245

and His Soul 'goes marching on,' assured,
eternal, irresistible through all the ages.

I am not astonished that those who reject
impulse as basis of the faith should attach
little value to its human interpretation by
the centuries. History to them is no other
than a long betrayal of the faith — a betrayal
by the fool people led by the knave priest —
that is, by the humanity they somewhat
curiously insist is the only proper object of
our affections ! Human documents are not
altogether cheerful reading, nor vox populi
always vox Dei, yet surely the belief that
history is useful to us in a merely negative
sense, as yielding only dark and terrible
warnings, is so obviously exaggerated and
so hopelessly paralytic that it would be
simply a waste of time to discuss it. That
the first, second, and third centuries, to say
nothing of the nineteenth and twentieth,
after full admittance of their vagaries and
their crimes, should still have something
not merely negative to teach us by way
of interpretation and development of the
Gospel of Jesus Christ, is on the face of it
a far saner and more probable assumption.
I have therefore no hesitation in appealing
to the records of His early followers and
to the explanation of His teaching by the
after-years.

On the threshold of Christian history is

246 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

heard the voice of St. Paul, Apostle of the
Gentiles, extremist cosmopolite, most un-
compromising enemy of any merely cramp-
ing national ceremony or tie. (It is
advisable for the Russian censors to be
ready with their brushes) :

* My manner of life from my youth,
which was at the first among mine own
nation at Jerusalem, know all the Jews ;
which knew me from the beginning, if they
would testify, that after the most str attest sect
of our religion I lived a Pharisee. And now
I stand and am judged for the hope of the
promise made of God unto our fathers: unto
which promise our twelve tribes^ instantly
serving God day and nighty hope to come.
For which hopes sake, King Agrippa, I am
accused of the Jews.'

Again, in his letter to the Corinthian
Church, he says : ' Are they Hebrews ? So
am I. Are they Israelites ? So am I. Are
they the seed of Abraham ? So am I. '

It has sometimes seemed to me that it
would not be far from the truth if we were
to look for the germ of the vast and catholic
understanding he afterwards developed in
the misdirected and exclusive nationalism
of earlier years as persecutor — a nationalism
retained in everything but its crudeness and
provincialism to the end of the chapter.

There is about all this a genuine ring

PATRIOTISM AND CHRISTIAN FAITH 247

that forbids us to attribute it to any merely
diplomatic considerations on the part of the
Apostle. Now, if this was the attitude of
St. Paul, whose pro-Gentile conflicts with
the Christo-Judaic communities were sharp
and frequent, we shall not be astonished
that the nationalism of these communities
should be even more pronounced and unmis-
takable. The first disciples were notoriously
desirous of keeping to the old paths. They
introduced no new religious system, they
founded no independent sect. They existed
simply as so many guilds within the
National Church, having for primary object
the recalling of their compatriots to the
pure worship of the God of their fathers,
who had in these last days spoken to them
in a Son. These Judaic guilds were, of
course, embryonic parts of the Catholic
Church, and even if St. Paul, that most
tremendous catholic factor, had never
existed, the new wine of their teaching
would undoubtedly, sooner or later, have
burst the old wine-skin ; but, as a matter of
actual fact, it was a purely external catas-
trophe that ultimately dislodged them from
the Commonwealth of Israel and forced
them into independence.

So far, then, we have seen that patriotism,
was by no means in these early days con-
sidered incompatible with the wider ideals

248 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

of the Christian movement. Natural and
particular aiFections of kinship, friendship,
or nationality were by no means to be
attacked or crushed out ; they were to be
controlled, encouraged, and guided into
larger channels ; in a word, to be fulfilled,
not destroyed.

Countless historical instances might be
cited in support of this pre-eminently
Christian doctrine of the expansiveness
of local affections, of this pre-eminently
Christian method of stressing both the par-
ticular and the universal, or, rather, the
universal in the 'particular. It will be suffi-
cient for my purpose to mention two such
instances — namely, the doctrine of pre-
destination and sacramental belief.

The belief in predestination as originally
taught by St. Paul, then narrowed by
St. Anselm, and later by post- Reformation
doctors, and finally expanded and elaborated
by almost contemporary theologians, has
as its root conception the election of especial
individuals or nations ; not of some close
aristocracy of the pious to exclusive rewards
and barren glories, but of a small band pre-
destined to the glory of service, servants of
the servants of God, lights set upon a hill
to guide the footsteps of the world along
the home-path, first-fruits of a multitudinous
harvest. Under one or other of these

PATRIOTISM AND CHRISTIAN FAITH 249

images has the idea been popularized. Per-
haps it has been best understood in our
own days, as found in the great National
Ode of a modern poet, of which these are
characteristic verses :

* Have the elder races halted 1

Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied over

there beyond the seas ?
We take up the task eternal, and the burden and

the lesson,

Pioneers ! 0 Pioneers !

' All the past we leave behind,
We debouch upon a newer, mightier, varied world ;
Fresh and strong the world we seize — world of
labour and the march,

Pioneers ! O Pioneers !

* We detachments steady throwing
Down the edges, through the passes, up the moun-
tains steep,

Conquering, daring, holding, venturing as we go the
unknown ways,

Pioneers ! 0 Pioneers !'

This idea of the predestined is the Christ-
ian equivalent of the Jewish belief in the
elect nation, and as clearly evidences the
compatibility of the two conceptions of the
particular and the universal.

But the most striking witness is borne to
this conception by sacramental beliefs com-
mon to almost all Christian schools, and
treated as fundamental by the Catholic
world — instance the rites of Baptism, Con-

250 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

firmation, Orders, and, above all, the Blessed
Sacrament of God's Body.

How close a parallel can be traced be-
tween its history and that of nationalism !
Is it not, for instance, those very cosmo-
politan sects, Tolstoyans and the like, who,
shocked at the corruptions of nationalism
and of the Mass, and confusing their abuses
with their essential character, have rejected
both, their vision of God becoming by reason
of this rejection vague and blurred ? And
are not the corruptions of the one and of
the other almost identical in nature? The
Divine Presence in the Mass, adored as a
Presence distinct, exclusive, cut off from
and incompatible with God's universal pre-
sence in the world, becomes an insupport-
able heresy. So, too, with the love of
country. A worship of the nation that is
narrow, and excludes admiration for the
traditions and heroisms of other countries,
that is in effect a denial of the universal
workings of God's Spirit, is the turning of
a great and legitimate sacrament into a
blasphemous fable and dangerous deceit.

That God is contained within wafer or
country is as necessary a proposition as it
is orthodox. That He is circumscribed or
limited by either the one or the other i«'
rank heresy ; none the less heresy if people,
holding it faintly and unenthusiastically,

PATRIOTISM AND CHRISTIAN FAITH 251

admit His, ^in a sense/ ubiquity. This
most objectionable phrase ' in a sense/
if you drive it into a corner, will generally
turn out to be heretical nonsense.

The fact is that human nature is so con-
stituted that it can get no real hold on the
universal excepting through its particular
and instinctive expressions. How full a
recognition of this is found in the Gospel
of Jesus Christ when one remembers that
to the Founder of our religion the natural
corollary of His words — * Woman, believe
Me the hour cometh, and now is, when ye
shall neither in this mountain nor yet at
Jerusalem worship the Father, for God is a
Spirit ' — was the taking of bread, the defi-
nite and common substance of everyday
life, and blessing it, and giving it to His
disciples, saying, * This is My body.* To
those disciples and to their children's
children it became clearer and clearer that
in Him they found all that was meant by
the word * God ' ; that He and their Father
were one ; that His body was the body of
the universal God; and, further, that just
as it was only in contact with the definite,
tangible human being that they had found
God, so in future it would be only through
this or that definite friendship, place, saint,
shrine, sacrament that they would keep in
touch with the Sacred Heart of the universe,

252 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS^ CLUB

the Soul of the souls of men. Assuredly
if a man fails to find God in the sacrament
of his daily bread, or in what blind people
would call some equally common and in-
significant trifle of his daily life, he will
search for Him in vain throughout or beyond
the confines of this huge world.

I therefore, for my part, do not shrink
from so bold a definition of this local Pre-
sence as is found in later Christian thought
and is implied in the first Anglican Prayer-
Book of Edward YL, where it says: 'And
every one (piece of bread) shall be divided
into two pieces, at the least, or more, at the
discretion of the minister, and so distri-
buted. And men must not think less to
be received in part than in the whole, but
in each of them the whole body of our
Saviour Jesus Christ' — i.e.^ the whole body
of God.

For these and other reasons, but above
all for these, I have been forced to the con-
clusion that it is something bigger than
chance that has driven the most catholic of
all religions to lay such stress upon par-
ticular afi'ections and worships, Is it not
rather the Spirit of the Incommensurate and
Unfathomable God, who for us men and for
our salvation becomes a child — a little child
in whom lies mirrored sun, moon, stars, and
everything ?

THE FACT OF THE MATTER

By the Editor

THERE are signs that the period of
transition in which we have been
living restlessly for the last twenty years is
coming to an end. People seem eager once
more to be anchored to some firm convic-
tions. Even political parties, resisting the
endeavours of opportunist statesmen to
keep them together, are showing a tendency
to split, and, let us hope, will carry out
the process till they reach a bed-rock of
fundamental principles on which they can
be built up again. The question of the
hour is a great one. What are to be the
ideals of the new era ? We are all more or
less agreed that this age of cynical indiffer-
ence and tinkering expedients should be
ended, but we have not all made up our
minds as to the way to end it.

Meanwhile, two principles, more or less
clearly defined and sufiiciently attractive,
have gradually emerged from the chaos;
and one of them at least has reached the
stage at which it is beginning to develop a
constructive policy. These principles are
253

254 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS^ CLUB

Imperialism and Cosmopolitanism, and it
is small wonder that many men, grown sick
of doubt, have become dupes of these high-
sounding delusions. For what great idea
is there in the field strong enough to inspire
opposition ? The two parties are both
divided by the test of these principles, and
only attack now this or now that mani-
festation of them with vague dissatisfaction
and from no clear standpoint of opposing
ideal. Still, the opposition is considerable,
and growing stronger now that Imperialism,
the most active of the forces, is unfolding
its programme. On what is that opposition
to be based ? To this question * England :
a Nation ' is an attempt, made as modestly
as our conviction that we have the truth
will allow, to provide an answer. It is to
be based on the principle of Patriotism.

This principle Mr. G. K. Chesterton
explains in the opening essay of this book,
and makes it clear that Imperialism is not,
as many would have us believe, a wider Pat-
riotism. He also explains the necessity for
emphasizing the patriotic idea. He shows
that those who build Empires destroy Pat-
riotism while they exploit it, and those
who frame Utopias deny it altogether. Our
Patriotism differs in the acceptance of the
fact of democracy from the patriotism of
Bolingbroke, and it differs, in being more

THE FACT OF THE MATTER 255

than a rhetorical phrase, from the patriotism
of Pitt in opposition or Mr. Chamberlain in
office, but it is the same love of our native
land as that which inspired the former, and
as that to which these latter appealed. It
is something more than Nationalism, which
is Patriotism on the defensive, and does not
provide a constructive policy. It seeks to
draw attention to England, and to empha-
size her needs and her duties.

The fact is that Great Britain is an island,
so situated as to be part of the European
system. * Greater Britain ' has no geo-
graphical significance, and sprawls amor-
phously over five continents. These two
entities attract two different and mutually
exclusive loyalties, the one Patriotism and
the other Imperialism. The one loyalty is
for a thing that we know and can under-
stand, a true organism, of which we can
predicate rights and duties ; the other leads
to that * thinking in continents ' which is
one of the recognised signs of madness.

We start, therefore, from our insular and
European position, but we do not forget
that this island is in a peculiar relation to
certain other countries in the world. It
has another island on its flank whose
interests are intimately bound up with its
own. It is the Mother-Country of many
large and flourishing Colonies, and it has

^^^

256 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

undertaken the grave responsibilities of an
Empire in the East — responsibilities, be it
said in passing, that have been carried out
in a manner which must be the pride of all
Englishmen, though some may regret that
we have no fixed policy or ideal of future
development. It has been clearly impossible
to deal with all these problems within the
compass of this book, and we are aware of
certain serious omissions. We should
have liked, for example, to have devoted
essays to our national defences and our
commercial position, both of which depend
for their character on the fact of our being
an island; to have associated ourselves with
those who demand a constant vigilance in
the affairs of our navy, and as strict and
jealous a criticism of its economy and
management as has lately been of necessity
directed towards our military organization;
and to have met Mr. Chamberlain's fiscal
proposals, not indeed with the destructive
criticism which, fortunately, seems now un-
necessary, but with certain counter-sugges-
tions, such as the better organization by the
State of our transport system both at home
and on the seas. With Mr. Chamberlain's
fiscal proposals is bound up, too, a political
question, perhaps their most important part,
involving our relations to our Colonies. It
is not difficult to apply our general principle

THE FACT OF THE MATTER 257

to this particular case. It seems clear that
we cannot benefit the Colonies without
injuring ourselves, and that we cannot
benefit ourselves without injuring the
Colonies. Why, then, attempt to substitute
for the sentimental ties which attach them
to us and us to them an artificial union
likely to result in jealousies and strife ?
Let them develop on their own lines, and,
most important of all to us, let us develop
on ours. We can get no further if we
imagine that we include them or that they
include us.

Though we could not achieve compre-
hensiveness in our treatment of the external
relations of the English nation, we have
selected as test cases for the application of
our principle three current and important
problems involving different issues. Mr.
Hugh Law argues that we cannot co-operate
with Ireland till we understand its national
characteristics, and that our failure to do so
seriously hampers our own national growth.
Mr. Nevinson emphasizes a duty that arises
from our European position and the treaty
obligations incidental to it, and shows how
Imperialism seems to have triumphed for a
time over our national conscience. Finally,
Mr. Hammond's essay describes aggressive
Imperialism in conflict with Nationalism, and
shows the loss to both conquerors and con-

17

258 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS^ CLUB

quered when an effort is made to impose
one self-conscious nationality on another.
Briefly, then, our foreign policy should be
based on the assumption that Great Britain
is an individual nation, with the rights and
duties of its individuality, and should
defend as a whole and throughout the
world, the institutions which are the growth
of the soil against the institutions which are
superimposed upon it.

While it is the supreme right of a nation
to defend its own existence, it is the supreme
duty of a nation to attend to its own con-
cerns. We are in danger of neglecting
England for an unknown and unknowable
entity, called the Empire. Patriotism pro-
tests ; for it must be ever anxiously diag-
nosing the needs of its country, and bringing
forward and testing, by its knowledge of and
jealousy for her national characteristics,
proposals for dealing with them. What is
the condition of England at the present
moment ? What are her chief needs, and how
can they be supplied ? These questions
have received some important answers of
late years from those who, consciously or
unconsciously, are in opposition to the
dominant Imperialistic spirit. We may cite
the patient investigations into the vital
problems of our existence of such devoted
patriots as Mr. Charles Booth and Messrs.

THE FACT OF THE MATTER 259

Eowntree and Sherwell, the effective sum-
mary of the needs of England in ' The
Heart of the Empire/ and the practical
proposals both of that work and of a more
recent book that should not be neglected,
' The Opportunity of Liberalism/ by Mr.
Brougham Villiers.^ We cannot hope to
provide a complete synthesis of such in-
vestigations and such proposals. We do
aim, though, at suggesting the lines on
which such a synthesis should be made.
We believe firmly that our principle can
provide a constructive policy of internal
reform.

One great fact emerges in any examina-
tion of the present condition of England —
the divorce of the great majority of English-
men from the soil of their native country.
Mr. Masterman and Mr. Ensor examine the
fact from different standpoints, and arrive
at very similar conclusions as to the main
need of England and the right way of sup-
plying it. They suggest the kind of schemes
— small holdings, garden cities, such fac-
tory legislation as will benefit the physical
condition of the mothers and children of
our people, and will enable education to be
more effectively given to our workers, the

* These examples are the first that come to mind.'
Many more might be given, and some have been in the
course of the book.

17—2

260 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS^ CLUB

preservation of the natural beauties of our
island — which will find their place in the
programme of the patriot. Education is a
question that the stress of industrial com-
petition is forcing on the attention of our
politicians, and there is a great danger that
the fact which is bringing it into prominence
may give it an unfortunate direction. We
may devote all our energies to turning out
good mechanics, and forget to make them
good Englishmen. Therefore Mr. Bray
pleads for us for a patriotic education.

These three essays deal with some of the
main problems of internal policy, to which
they aim at applying our general principle ;
financial problems have been neglected, save
for Mr. Masterman's endorsement of the
scheme of taxing, internal reforms, for land
values at home and capital invested abroad.
Fiscal schemes are not, perhaps, of the
paramount importance that some would
have us believe. They tend to obscure
greater issues. ' Man does not live by bread
alone,' quoted Mr. Chamberlain at the be-
ginning of his present campaign, and the
quotation was greeted with the ^ loud
laughter ' that no doubt followed the re^
mark in its first utterance. We agree with
him, only with the reservation that we
would offer a different alternative from
bacon. There are two dangers, however.

THE FACT OF THE MATTER 261

arising from the industrial organization of
the modern world, against which those who
desire England for the English must be
especially on their guard : the one is the
development in England of trusts on the
American system, a development from
which we are partially saved by our Free
Trade policy ; the other is the insidious
influence of the cosmopolitan financier, an
influence the character and danger of which
have recently been pointed out in Mr.
Belloc's satire, ' Emmanuel Burden,* a
book to rack the heart of the patriot.

We have developed our principle, and
roughly shown it, as it were, in action. But
an important question waits to be answered :
Is Patriotism too narrow a loyalty for the
Christian ? Mr. Conrad Noel answers this
question in his essay, showing that the
Christian religion is in no wise hostile to
the particularity of the patriotic idea. He
goes further, and argues, in opposition to
the Tolstoyan view of Christianity, that
the teaching of Christ is favourable to the
development of local and particular loyalt}^

We plead, then, for England, a nation,
that in the large enterprises of the twentieth
century she may not be forgotten, and that
she may not, in lust of gold or dominion,
forget herself. We plead for the whole'
country as against class interests of any

262 PAPERS OF THE PATRIOTS' CLUB

kind whatever. Too long have we been
drinking up

' Demure as at a grave,
Pollutions from the brimming cup of wealth.*

We would recruit the young men of
England for a new enterprise, offering them
no reward but the glory of working for the
land of their birth. Various battle-cries
are stirring the country — ^ On to a World
Empire !' ' On to Universal Brotherhood,'
* Back to Protection !' ' Back to the Land!'
Our battle-cry is * Back to England !' which
we claim to be more comprehensive than
some of these, more practical than others,
and more inspiriting than them all.

' 0 native Britain ! 0 my Mother Isle !
How shouldst thou prove aught else but dear and

holy
To me, who from thy lakes and mountain-hills,
Thy clouds, thy quiet dales, thy rocks and seas,
Have drunk in all my intellectual life,
All sweet sensations, all ennobling thoughts,
All adoration of the God in nature,
All lovely and all honourable things,
Whatever makes this mortal spirit feel
The joy and greatness of its future being 1
There lives nor form nor feeling in my soul
Unborrowed from my country. 0 divine
And beauteous island ! thou hast been my sole
And most magnificent temple, in the which
I walk with awe and sing my stately songs,
Loving the God that made me !'

BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD.

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